Search results for "POLITICS"
showing 10 items of 2266 documents
Language and New Nationalism in Higher Education
2020
This chapter discusses the emerging concerns for the national languages, in particular Finnish. English, previously seen in relatively positive terms in the Finnish society, begins to be construed as a threat to Finnish higher education and research, and to Finnish language at large. The chapter discusses developments since the new University Act 2009. The tension between English and the national languages develops at the same time with changes in the political climate and the rise of populist and (new) nationalist politics, both in Finland and globally. The chapter presents the recycled discourses of frozen constitutional bilingualism, economic nationalism, political elites and killer Engl…
Family and Affective Models in Children's Literature. An Approach from the Texts for Early Readers at Valencian Schools
2015
Abstract In previous researches we have offered a panoramic view about the presence of family structures different from the traditional one in children's literature, (Oltra Albiach, 2011), about the (shy) presence of protagonists with homo-parent, single- parent families reconstructed or intercultural in children's titles and about the publications of these characteristics in the literature for first readers that have seen the light in recent years (Oltra Albiach & Pardo Coy, 2013). It is noted that the introduction of these literatures in initial schools remains in general a pending matter, especially if we take into account that it is an ideal level to prevent and treat stereotypes and pr…
Populismo municipal y nacionalcatolicismo en la Valencia del general Primo de Rivera: el marqués de Sotelo (1923-1930) = Populism and Municipal Propa…
2016
El presente trabajo pretende explicar las principales características políticas del régimen de Primo de Rivera en la ciudad de Valencia. Desde un análisis de la política municipal, el populismo y la publicidad de la construcción de obras públicas se presentan como los principales pilares para la consolidación del régimen en Valencia. La praxis política del marqués de Sotelo supuso para la ciudad el primer contacto con el nacionalcatolicismo. La figura de este alcalde, además, ocupa buena parte del texto al ser un fiel exponente de las prácticas políticas nacidas tras el golpe de septiembre de 1923.This paper aims to explain the main features of the political regime of Primo de Rivera in the…
Rural futures in developed economies: The case of Finland
2015
Abstract This study presents four possible images of rural futures in Finland: decentralized bio-economy, colonial countryside, museum countryside and rural business islets. They are distilled through literature reviews, futures workshops and futures tables. Alternative specifications of structures, contents and agencies result in highly divergent states of key dimensions and, consequently, divergent rural futures. This diversity challenges the conventional public wisdom or intellectual monoculture that considers decay as the only future for rural areas. Key challenges in crafting plausible but divergent futures images are finding an appropriate level of abstraction or “flight altitude”, es…
The Discursive Constitution of a World-Spanning Region and the Role of Empty Signifiers: The Case of Francophonia
2007
The cultural turn in political science, history, and political geography has opened new perspectives on the division of the world into geographic entities. Nation-states, regions, districts, etc., are no longer qualified as quasi-natural objects based upon intrinsic qualities but, rather, as contingent results of social or accordingly discursive processes. The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) defines Francophonia as an “geocultural space” (espace geoculturel) and an international community of more than 50 states. In this contribution, the concept of political communities as “imagined communities” and the advancements of discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe are used in o…
Analysis of the bryophyte diversity of mountain ranges in Sicily.
2015
The focus of this study was an analysis of the bryophyte flora of the main Sicilian mountain ranges, i.e., Peloritani, Nebrodi and Madonie mountains, located along the northern side of the Island, the Sicani mountains, located in the west-central Sicily and the Etna, the highest and most active volcano of Europe. The overall bryoflora consists of 504 taxa, 400 mosses and 104 liverworts and hornworts. It represent the 85.3% of the whole Sicilian flora; the mosses are referred to 37 families, the liverworts together with hornworts to 31 families. The phytogeographical analysis has shown the prevalence of the Mediterranean species, with the highest value on the Sicani mountains. It is notewort…
An operator view on alliances in politics
2015
We introduce the concept of an {\em operator decision making technique} and apply it to a concrete political problem: should a given political party form a coalition or not? We focus on the situation of three political parties, and divide the electorate into four groups: partisan supporters of each party and a group of undecided voters. We consider party-party interactions of two forms: shared or differing alliance attitudes. Our main results consist of time-dependent decision functions for each of the three parties, and their asymptotic values, i.e., their final decisions on whether or not to form a coalition.
Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?
2014
First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997a) offered the first cross-national study of the emergence and entrenchment of food aid and charitable food banking from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It consists of five case studies from advanced industrial countries with developed ‘liberal’ welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. All of the countries were food exporters and food secure through national production and imports, suggesting that domestic hunger could not be caused by the failure to provide sufficient food and nutrition, but rather was a matter of distributional justice and human rights — that is a fundamentally political issue.
Racism, Xenophobia and Intolerance
2015
Unlike what is usually assumed, racism is neither a phenomenon of the past nor exclusive to other latitudes. As Wieviorka points out (2009, p. 15), today there has been a surprising return of racism, even in societies that could be expected to be ridding themselves of it. Until the 1960s, the outlook clearly seemed optimistic, as the prevailing idea was that political and economic progress would end up burying phenomena of this type. This hypothesis, however, was soon revealed to be overly optimistic. Racism currently exists in European societies, and it is one of the great challenges of their present and future. Therefore, regardless of future social evolution, it is likely that European s…
‘Independence is not given, it is taken’: the Ivorian cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence
2013
This article explores competing histories of independence in Cote d'Ivoire. The 2010 commemoration of fifty years of independence led to competing histories about how and if the nation achieved independence in 1960. The postelectoral crisis of 2010–2011 that followed soon afterwards has been interpreted by supporters of the outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo as an attempt by France and the international community to re-colonise Cote d'Ivoire. The article asks how different versions of this history are connected to different political projects and how they have changed through time. The article will analyse these processes of meaning-making in a historiology of Ivorian independence, thus cont…