Suchergebnisse

Today, the need to reduce the rise of disasters in cities is a priority for European governments (United Nation Strategy for Disaster reduction, 2007). Natural or industrial hazard identification is improving thanks to the mobilisation of the scientific community and the recent political awareness. Indeed, in developed urbanised countries, and in addition in cities shown as nod of economical and informational urban network, the impacts of natural or industrial disasters also produce collective damages. The examples of three French cities (Lyon, Nantes and Le Havre) illustrate how the ends of urban public policies generate huge contradictions in risk reduction strategy. Furthermore, it also shows how urban development objectives can create "urban risks". I will explain my point by two outlines. First, risk is defined as social construction. Constructivism does not minimise effective disasters, but it explains the role of the historical urban settlement and the contemporary goals of local development. Secondly, both hazard identification and urban planning are described as a public policy. Drawing on theories of political agenda setting, hazard identification in urban planning is studied as a complex public policy hold by various stakeholders (either public than private) and crossed by different interests.

Today, the need to reduce the rise of disasters in cities is a priority for European governments (United Nation Strategy for Disaster reduction, 2007). Natural or industrial hazard identification is improving thanks to the mobilisation of the scientific community and the recent political awareness. Indeed, in developed urbanised countries, and in addition in cities shown as nod of economical and informational urban network, the impacts of natural or industrial disasters also produce collective damages. The examples of three French cities (Lyon, Nantes and Le Havre) illustrate how the ends of urban public policies generate huge contradictions in risk reduction strategy. Furthermore, it also shows how urban development objectives can create "urban risks". I will explain my point by two outlines. First, risk is defined as social construction. Constructivism does not minimise effective disasters, but it explains the role of the historical urban settlement and the contemporary goals of local development. Secondly, both hazard identification and urban planning are described as a public policy. Drawing on theories of political agenda setting, hazard identification in urban planning is studied as a complex public policy hold by various stakeholders (either public than private) and crossed by different interests.

This article argues for the usefulness of adopting the case study as an effective and sufficient strategy from the perspective of developing research papers in the field of Military Science. In the first stage, using Saunders' model, I showed the logical course of a researcher's reasoning up to the moment of establishing a suitable research strategy according to his object of study, the topic of interest or the problem formulated at the initiation of the scientific approach. Afterwards, I justified the motivation for choosing the case study as a research strategy, bringing to attention the main advantages and disadvantages that it entails. I thus had two objectives in writing this article: to emphasize the importance of clarifying and establishing certain research design, exemplified by going through the layers of Saunders' model, and subsequently to highlight the versatility and flexibility of the case study as a research strategy, as it is accepted and used in all fields of scientific research.

Le nom du chanoine Charles-Aloyse Fontaine (1754-1834), devenu aujourd'hui presque immémoré, reste indissociablement attaché à l'histoire politique, religieuse et culturelle du canton de Fribourg. Ecclésiastique libéral, partisan et acteur de la révolution helvétique, dévoué administrateur de l'école du Père Girard, pionnier de l'historiographie fribourgeoise et premier contributeur des musées cantonaux, il dynamisa la vie de sa cité durant plus d'un demi-siècle. Sa correspondance, qui s'étend de 1782 à 1834, rend compte de son action réformatrice et de la plupart de ses travaux scientifiques. Classées dans six chapitres thématiques, les 160 lettres éditées dans ce volume relient le Fribourgeois à une quarantaine d'interlocuteurs originaires de Suisse, d'Allemagne, de France et d'Italie. La correspondance met en exergue à la fois les occupations éclectiques d'un savant universel et la vie domestique d'un riche bourgeois en quête de prestige social. Par les sujets abordés, elle offre un matériau exceptionnel pour réinterroger les interrelations entre Église, sciences et révolutions à la fin du siècle des Lumières.

NRC-CISTI serves Canada as its National Science Library (as mandated by Canada's Parliament in 1924) and also provides direct support to researchers of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). By reason of its mandate, vision, and strategic positioning, NRC-CISTI has been rapidly and effectively mobilizing Canadian stakeholders and resources to become a lead player on both the Canadian national and international scenes in matters relating to the organization and management of scientific research data. In a previous communication (CODATA International Conference, 2008), the orientation of NRC-CISTI towards this objective and its short- and medium-term plans and strategies were presented. Since then, significant milestones have been achieved. This paper presents NRC-CISTI's most recent activities in these areas, which are progressing well alongside a strategic organizational redesign process that is realigning NRC-CISTI's structure, mission, and mandate to better serve its clients. Throughout this transformational phase, activities relating to data management remain vibrant.

PurposeCynthia Cockburn's research spans some three decades and has covered several major and distinct themes – technology and technical change, organizational equality policies and practices, and more recently conflict studies – but she has consistently studied gender from a feminist perspective and it is this interest that binds her work together. She has published more than ten books, numerous book chapters, articles, pamphlets and reports. Aims to find out more about this person.Design/methodology/approachThis article is based on an interview with Cynthia Cockburn conducted in March 2006.FindingsHer book In the Way of Women, published in 1991, stands out as having had enormous influence – it is still widely cited today, making it one of the classic texts and essential reading for those researching the dynamics of inequalities in organizational contexts. This article deals largely with the themes and methodological issues posed by Cynthia's early‐mid 1990s research focusing on organizational equality.Originality/valueThis is an update on this influential researcher's work and ideas on women, equality and social science research.

Starting nearly from scratch in the early 1960s, Africa has experienced an academic boom and an impressive increase of scientists, much of the growth occurring in the 1970s. Valiant efforts have also been made to build up national research systems. But the results are far from satisfactory and the conditions under which scientific research is carried out in Africa today are clearly deteriorating. This situation has brought increasing concern among funding agencies and African decision makers who are now looking for new approaches and strategies for scientific cooperation. Following a brief overview of scientific research in Africa, the debate on African research and the evolution of policies supporting science and technology for development from the 1960s onward are reviewed. Donors' strategies, for the most part, are to argue for a revision of domestic policies on research management toward a policy of regional inte gration and of selective support to a limited number of "centers of excellence. " The questions raised by these new strategies are examined in the conclusion of this article.

This article considers the global expansion of agrofuels feedstock production from a political economy perspective. It considers and dismisses the environmental and pro-poor developmental justifications attached to agrofuels. To local populations and direct producers, the specific destination of the crop as fuel, food, cosmetics or other final uses in faraway places is probably of less interest than the forms of (direct or indirect) appropriation of their land and the forms of their insertion or exclusion as producers in global commodity chains. Global demand for both agrofuels and food is stimulating new forms (or the resurgence of old forms) of corporate land grabbing and expropriation, and of incorporation of smallholders in contracted production. Drawing both on recent studies on agrofuels expansion and on the political economy literature on agrarian transition and capitalism in agriculture, this article raises the question whether 'agrofuels capitalism' is in any way essentially different from other forms of capitalist agrarian monocrop production, and in turn whether the agrarian transitions involved require new tools of analysis.

Western commentators have often criticized the state of press freedom in China, arguing that individual speech still suffers from arbitrary restrictions and that its mass media remains under an authoritarian mode. Yet the history of press freedom in the Chinese context has received little examination. Unlike conventional historical accounts which narrate the institutional development of censorship and people's resistance to arbitrary repression, Freedom of the Press in China: A Conceptual History, 1831-1949 is the first comprehensive study presenting the intellectual trajectory of press freedom. It sheds light on the transcultural transference and localization of the concept in modern Chinese history, spanning from its initial introduction in 1831 to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. By examining intellectuals' thoughts, common people's attitudes, and official opinions, along with the social-cultural factors that were involved in negotiating Chinese interpretations and practices in history, this book uncovers the dynamic and changing meanings of press freedom in modern China.

On December 23, 1921, the Swiss Federal Council received a note from the French Embassy to the effect that the Council of the League of Nations had entrusted the French government with the transportation of the international troops called to supervise the plebiscite to be held in the contested area between Poland and Lithuania. It had been decided, the note stated, to transport the Belgian, British, and Spanish troops through Switzerland, and France now requested the Swiss government to grant them free passage. Although the contingents were not to participate in war, but only to watch over a plebiscite to be held under the auspices of the League, the Swiss government refused the permission sought. At the time of the plebiscite in the Saar territory, the Federal Council took a similar attitude. It refused to permit Italian troops to pass through Swiss territory on their way to the Saar Valley.

"In 1994, historian Stephen Stigler placed a mail-order purchase for a rare bit of ephemera from a French bookstore: a lottery Almanac from 1834. It contained the winning numbers for the entire span of the French Loterie from 1758 onward, including details on prizes actually awarded-difficult data to come by-as well as hand-written notes by an early owner. Stigler was fascinated with what he saw about how the Loterie was carried out, who bought tickets, and what size bets they placed, and so in the decades that followed he amassed booklets, legal documents, advertising bills, notices, contracts, and tickets. His own collection and extensive additional research helped him piece together the Loterie's remarkable inner workings, as well as its implications for how we understand the history of risk more broadly. In the 1750s at the urging of famed philandering adventurer Giocomo Casanova (who had recently escaped from a Venetian prison by means of a sharpened iron, an accomplice, a rope of bed sheets, and a stolen gondola), the French state began to embrace risk in its approach to the Loterie. The prize amounts varied depending on the number of tickets bought, and the amount of the bet was determined by each individual bettor. The state could lose money on any individual lot but was statistically guaranteed it would come out on top in the long run. Stigler follows the Loterie from its curious inception to a 1776 expansion, to its interruption during the French Revolution (but only with the Terror of 1793), to its renewal in 1797 and further expansion, and finally to its suppression in 1836, examining throughout the wider question of how members of the public came to trust in new financial technologies and believe in their value"--

Latin Americans represent one of the most sizable migrant communities in Spain. Yet, unlike other minority groups, they count with longer migration tradition, linguistic and cultural similarities with the Spanish population, and easier access to Spanish nationality. Drawing on original data covering a large number of candidates ( N = 5,055), this article examines whether this apparently favorable configuration guarantees the nomination of candidates from this minority group at local elections in municipalities with strong demographic presence of Latin American residents. Our findings indicate that this group is still underrepresented in Spanish politics. Few Latin American candidates are fielded by political parties, and even fewer (<2%) manage to achieve elected office. To interpret these results, we examine the extent to which Spanish parties field minority candidates. We show that while some parties are proactively including these candidates, only few nominate them in secure positions of the electoral lists and that Spanish parties' inclusiveness does not seem to be aligned with Latin American voters' partisan preferences.

This article employs narrative analysis to examine three testimonies provided by individuals who were contemporaries of lesbians in Soviet Latvia. The author's research is based on two oral history interviews and the diary entries of a homosexual man, dating between the 1950s and 1980s. The research was carried out in four stages: (1) story analysis; (2) identification of main topics and characters; (3) identification of main terms and tone; and (4) extraction of three key narratives. The findings demonstrate, firstly, the lack of terminology to describe homosexual/non-heterosexual relationships between women when referencing the Soviet time. This indicates that contemporary terms used by the LGBTQI+ community may not be valid for analysing the experiences of non-heterosexual people in Soviet Latvia. Secondly, the testimonies described in this article view same-sex women's relationships through heteronormative lens as deviating from the norm. Thirdly, the article highlights how rigid expectations of "manly" and "womanly" behaviour and traits are used to judge compliance with or deviation from societal norms. The understanding of non-heterosexual relationships between women, as evidenced by the sources, cannot be standardised. While the testimonies reference non-heterosexual relationships between women, they also mention same-sex relationships, which may have formed due to socioeconomic conditions and different intimate bonds.

This article offers an analysis of seven articles from the Review of Radical Political Economics' series "What 'Radical' Means in the 21st Century." Without reference to feminism, the authors' definitions of "radical" hinge critically on insight from feminist radical political economy. Instead of feminist radical political economy fitting under a broader body of political economy that coheres around radicalism, it is in feminist insight that radical political economy finds roots: according to the series' authors, it is what makes radical political economy radical. Yet although the Union for Radical Political Economics hosted the development of the building blocks of feminist theory in economics between 1968 and 1991, feminist contributions remain largely unacknowledged. I offer strategies for repositioning feminism not as a side project but as a critical source of insight for radical political economy. JEL Classification: B54, B51, B24