Call and Response

In London, in the context of a shortfall of homes that has achieved the status of “housing crisis”, the replacement of obsolete social housing stock, inherited from the post-war period of mass production, for housing that satisfies the demands of the private market and the need for more sustainable cities is one of the main issues for the 21st century. Robin Hood Gardens’ demolition will become a paradigm for the positions to be taken respecting urban obsolescence. Across London, one can see examples that show how, by the criteria of contemporary urban planning, the domestic and urban potential of much of the post-war social housing stock makes it difficult for the current owner, the local government, to invest in its refurbishment and to keep its status as social housing.

Newspaper reader comments are those short, fragmentary, frequently polemical and mostly anonymous ‘replies’ posted to online newspaper articles. And while online comments have attracted much attention in recent years, the experience of reading them has yet to be explored. Newspaper comments have been examined in detail from two key perspectives in the scholarly literature, but by focusing almost exclusively on the text, both journalism studies and public sphere theorists have overlooked the situated sense-making of the reader herself. This study aims to fill this gap by focussing on the embodied know-how and everyday practices through which readers make comments mean. To do this, it draws on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1970), Martin Heidegger (1962) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) as well as the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975). The research underpinning this thesis was structured around in-depth interviews and digital-observation methods with four reader-participants, two of whom are Irish and two Spanish. Travelling to visit each individual in one of their own everyday settings, I observed and took field notes on their media practices, both print and digital, and interviewed them about their experience of reading a newspaper article and its corresponding comments. The articles we read together were selected from either The Irish Times newspaper or the Spanish El Pais; the participants’ own newspapers of choice. The articles and their comments centred on aspects of the housing crises that were rapidly unfolding in each country at the time of the interviews and this context came to play a central role in understanding how the readers made sense of those texts. For several months after these initial interviews I maintained email and video correspondences with each participant, asking further questions and talking through ongoing media experiences. I also carried out an auto-hermeneutic exercise that involved video recording my own media practices and ‘free writing’ responses to the same media texts used in the interviews. In a thematic analysis designed around the concept of the hermeneutic circle, I developed a phenomenological interpretation of three core themes that emerged from this ‘data’. These themes highlight the significance of the readers’ own referential systems for structuring their daily encounters with the news media; they point to a fundamental contrast between the way the readers engaged with the newspaper article and how they engaged with the comment; and finally, they highlight the role of the white space around the comments in facilitating a ‘conversational’ experience in reading them.

The housing crisis in cities across the globe has been shaped by an architecture of neoliberal housing policy. However, to bring myriad qualitatively and nationally disparate modes of housing privatisation, restriction, individualisation and marketisation under the umbrella of a single, monolithic ‘neoliberalism’ risks limiting explanatory power, ignoring national particularity and privileging theory over ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Therefore, this paper attempts a cosmopolitan understanding of these processes across the North/South dichotomy, comparing the trajectories of two cities seen as archetypal examples of housing neoliberalisation: Santiago and London. Drawing on Latin American and Global North literatures, we analyse the socio-spatial and political-institutional effects emerging from neoliberal transformations of access to housing. By exploring mutations in: the role of the state; the origin/purpose of funding/financing; the class composition of policy beneficiaries; the geography of public housing; and, housing tenure, the paper produces a rich comparison of two significantly different housing systems. Written in the spirit of ‘new comparativism’, the paper contributes to the ongoing decentring of Western-dominated theories of neoliberalism. Two importantly different city-trajectories emerge, and these particularities enable us to add depth to our understanding of the current housing crises, while at the same time drawing cross-border comparisons and conclusions, and cosmopolitanising our theories of neoliberalisation.

Lithium mining, water resources, and socio-economic issues in northern Argentina: We are not all in the same boat

<p>Droughts are long-lasting and have a range of cascading impacts on society. These impacts and their responses can influence the further development of the drought itself, but also continue into the period after the drought ended. Especially if society is hit by a next hydrological extreme event, heavy rainfall resulting in flooding, the effects of this may be increased or decreased by the preceding drought and its impacts and responses. We here present a review and a global assessment of cases of these events, based on scientific literature, NGO and governmental reports, and newspaper articles, to study the diversity of how drought affects flood risk. We find that the balance between the positive and negative effects of extreme rainfall after a long dry period is mostly dependent on the underlying vulnerability and the effect of specific responses, and is different for different countries, and for different sectors and groups in society. Based on our initial analysis of the collection of case studies, we see some emerging patterns. For example, in Europe, the USA and Australia, the highly managed water system with hard infrastructure and early-warning systems makes that in most cases the rainfall after drought are managed and adverse effects mitigated, but also lock-ins exist that can make feedbacks of either inaction or maladaptation result in increased economic losses. In Africa and Latin-America, with a fragile governance system, less hard infrastructure, and a more exposed population, extreme rainfall after drought brings relief and replenishment of water resources, but also increased impacts, conflict and displacement. Here, we hypothesise that impacts are unequally distributed in society, because of issues of power, access to land and water resources, inadequate soft infrastructures, etc. We will test this hypothesis with an in-depth qualitative study of local stakeholder knowledge of these human-water processes in selected case studies. The typology of drought-to-flood events that we developed can serve as a starting point for further research on the complexity of these cascading events.</p>

COVID-19 pandemic has had a hard impact on all educational sectors where access to schools, educational institutions, and university campuses is forcibly halted. In this context, the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research urged teachers to move from face-to-face to online learning to mitigate the spread of the virus, keep up the regular schedule and save the academic year. This paper highlights the issues, perspectives, and pedagogical practices of the instructors’ overnight change, switching pre-existing face-to-face learning to the online environment. It also refers to the challenge of those learners lacking intercultural communication skills needed to participate virtually. The researchers used the documentary research method to develop their leading research question and analyse existing research documents and other e-sources of information such as university and government reports, newspapers, PDF books, papers, and YouTube channels to collect relevant data for this study. As a result, we could illustrate the Algerian universities’ response and analyse government and university sources such as newspaper articles and ministry decrees. Therefore, we believe that the emergency to digitalize teaching in our higher institutions is a significant opportunity to keep engaged in the online environment now and after the pandemic and take advantage of the universities’ best pedagogical practices. Thus, prepare for the online shift to better address the digital divide by promoting equal opportunities for all students to access the Internet, possess and effectively use Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) to fully participate in the modern educational system.

Nigeria’s social landscape has been inundated by an alarming spate of rape and child defilement cases, so much more that there is hardly a week without media reports of rape in the country. Records released by the Nigeria Police Force shows that a total of seven hundred and seventeen cases of rape and child defilement were recorded in the first five months of the year 2020. More alarming is the defilement of minors and underage children by adults. The foregoing raises concerns and the need to interrogate the causes of alarming cases of rape and defilement of minors in Nigeria. The mixed methods research approach was adopted to generate both primary and secondary data. For the primary data, an online questionnaire was designed and administered to a total of two hundred and nine Nigerians across various sectors and regions of the country. Besides, six (6) key informants, each from the Ministry of Women, Legal Department, National Human Rights Commission, NGO, religious leader and media practitioners, were interviewed. On the other hand, government reports, gazettes, journal and newspaper articles were used to generate secondary data. Findings show that defilement of minors in Nigeria is perceived from a socio-cultural perspective as an avenue for money rituals. Other causes include mental disorders of perpetrators, alcoholism and substance abuse. Effects of such acts are physical and psychological. Recommendations on ways of curbing the menace include life sentences, name shame of perpetrators, and strict enforcement of existing laws prohibiting rape and defilement in the country.

Reviewed by: Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South by Leonard Rogoff Anne Gessler Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South. By Leonard Rogoff. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 354. $35.00, ISBN 978–1-4696–3079-3.) In the first biography of Goldsboro, North Carolina, suffragist and social justice activist Gertrude Weil, historian Leonard Rogoff's argument is twofold. First, he counters Eli Evans's portrayal of North Carolina Jews as provincial by arguing that although Weil was entangled in the state's complex racial and gendered hierarchies, she was "cosmopolitan with roots" (p. x). Second, Rogoff offers Weil's career as usable history for readers seeking to "live a meaningful life" (p. xi). Weil was steeped in classical Reform Judaism and the civic-minded German ethos of Bildung—"moral education and self-improvement"—and she believed that Jews were meant to model moral conduct for other nations (p. 2). While Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South builds on literature on North Carolina, women's studies, and Jewish history, Rogoff closely follows Anne Firor Scott's classic survey The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago, 1970), which documents how the southern women's club movement helped affluent white southern women build networks crucial to organizing politically. Rogoff also complements Pamela Tyler's and Landon R. Y. Storrs's research on the southern woman suffrage movement and consumer activists' emerging maternalist political apparatus. Weil mirrors Storrs's twentieth-century Jewish consumers and advocates whose northern education and international affiliation made radical, interracial organizing possible. Weil's career, however, provides a long view of grassroots movements, and Rogoff extends organizational histories by charting how Weil mobilized social networks to mitigate segregation, poverty, and public health crises for seventy years. The first four chapters examine Weil's spiritual and educational development. Rogoff outlines the Weil family's German Jewish familial network that linked urban nodes like New York City and Baltimore to outposts such as Goldsboro and facilitated assimilation while maintaining traditions, language, and ties to Europe. Additionally, Weil's classical education in North Carolina and at Smith College sharpened the independent, civically engaged idealism that propelled her to join New Woman social work agencies that advocated "municipal housekeeping" to reform political systems (p. 73). Next, Rogoff explores the interplay of Weil's interwar activism, science, and Jewish identity. As a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the North Carolina Association of Jewish Women, Weil attended social work conferences and rooted "democracy and social justice in the canon of Israel" (p. 105). Yet racist and classist paternalism complicated Weil's egalitarianism. For instance, in 1919 she declared that black women's enfranchisement "is a problem" to be solved by strict voting requirements and not by "injustice and discriminations against the white women" (p. 119). In 1927 Weil called for economic equity while suggesting that allowing the poor and the "feeble-minded" to procreate exacerbated "social problems" (p. 200). Rogoff concedes that Weil's abstract idealism translated into "utopian thinking that overlooked social and racial consequences" (p. 202). Rogoff shines in chapter 9, where he traces the southern, northern, and European channels that Weil used to rescue a dozen relatives from Nazi-occupied Europe. She doggedly interceded with American and foreign governments and [End Page 193] spent thousands of dollars to secure family members' visas and make travel arrangements. Rogoff narrates Weil's heartbreaking failures with building tension, as wartime bureaucratic delays prevented one of her relatives from fleeing to Cuba before its borders closed. Rogoff thus illustrates the deeply personal stakes that colored Weil's postwar commitment to Zionism, building domestic religious institutions, and racial integration as an antifascist measure. Marshaling an impressive array of letters, ephemera, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, and government reports from the Gertrude Weil Papers and other archives, Rogoff painstakingly documents Weil's wide-ranging philanthropic, political, and religious efforts. However, without consistent historical signposting and confusing chronology, undergraduates and readers unfamiliar with the subject may become mired in Rogoff's thicket of details and dense prose. Nonetheless, Gertrude Weil invites further research into the history of southern Jewish women's organizations, specifically...

This paper investigates how budget padding affects leadership credibility, accountability, and public policy making in Nigeria. Budget padding refers to the dishonest and illegal inclusion of extra or false figures in government budgets for personal or political benefit. This practice has become a growing concern in Nigeria’s public finance system, as it undermines good governance and delays national development. The paper used a qualitative research method and data were collected from secondary sources such as academic journals, government reports, newspaper articles, and official documents. A content analysis approach was used to examine patterns, causes, and effects of budget padding in Nigeria and how it connects to leadership and policy making. The paper discussed how budget padding causes waste, mismanagement of funds, and a loss of public trust in leaders. It explored the forms of padding, such as inflated project costs and fake budget items, and identifies key causes including political influence, poor oversight, and lack of transparency. It also examined how this practice affects leadership credibility, reduces accountability, and weakens democratic institutions. The findings revealed that budget padding has serious negative effects on public confidence, policy implementation, and development planning. Cases like the ₦40 billion padding scandal in 2016, ₦20 billion in 2018, ₦90 billion in 2019 and ₦3.7 trillion in 2024 shows that the issue is systemic and calls for urgent action. The paper recommended among others that strict enforcement of budget laws, transparent budget processes, increased citizen participation, and punishment of offenders. Promoting honest and accountable leadership is necessary to improve governance and ensure meaningful development in Nigeria.

PurposeThis paper aims to call for change in disaster research through a metis-based approach that values practical skills and knowledge (vs technical knowledge) derived from responding to ongoing changes in the natural and human environment.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on metis from Miami-Dade County that is prone to an array of climate-related disasters. Metis is supplemented by a review of secondary sources (e.g. newspaper articles, government reports).FindingsThere is a need to reconceptualize disaster phases in disaster research—preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation. For many members of marginalized communities of color, this paper depicts preparedness and mitigation as luxuries and response as a time of worry about financial obligations and survival after the disaster. It suggests that even communities that are not on a hurricane's path could have post-disaster experiences. It also highlights ongoing risks to marginalized communities' physical and mental well-being that are in addition to the mental health impacts of the disaster during the recovery phase.Originality/valueThis paper's originality is twofold: (1) underlining the importance of metis, a less studied and understood concept in disaster risk reduction, prevention and management literature and (2) questioning disaster researchers' technical knowledge with respect to each of the four disaster phases in light of metis.

Washington State’s Puget Sound Region has a shortfall of over 156,000 housing units yielding the nation’s third largest population of people experiencing homelessness. At the same time, the region is investing $56 billion in light rail and bus rapid transit with over seventy stations scheduled to open between now and 2041. This offers an historic opportunity to leverage public transit to build complete, equitable and resilient communities at scale in response to a worsening housing affordability crisis and growing impacts of climate change. However, this will not happen without community intervention. Sound Communities is a volunteer group of civic leaders from the public, private, non-profit, and academic sectors, including architecture and real estate faculty from the University of Washington College of Built Environments (UW CBE) focused on leveraging this transit investment to address the region’s housing and climate crises at scale by building complete, equitable and resilient communities at planned station areas. The group is working with elected leaders, city staff, technical advisors, and community stakeholders from multiple jurisdictions in designing and advocating for an entity, the Housing Benefits District (HBD), that will help to ensure that all the region’s residents prosper from its transit investment and economic growth.

The conflict in the southern Philippines is regarded by many as one of the longest internal conflicts in the world. Beginning from the 16th century when Spanish colonial domination commenced, the conflict had persisted for five centuries. Recently, however, there are positive signs that this conflict will come to an end. On October 15, 2012, the Government of the Philippines (GPH) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed the historic Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro (FAB) in order to finally put an end to the decades-long conflict. Under the FAB, the Bangsamoro people will have a new political autonomy that will be called “Bangsamoro Government.” This will replace the existing autonomy in Mindanao, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Malaysia, the third-party facilitator for more than a decade, played a significant role in the making of this landmark agreement. The research presented here has been undertaken with the objective of exploring various approaches in search for a lasting peace in Mindanao. It examines the impact of militancy in the quest for peace, starting from the Spanish era until the current administration. This research revisits how the Moros resisted the Spaniards and Americans during the colonial era, and the Philippine forces after independence. Although there were efforts by previous administrations to solve the conflict, they did not achieve lasting peace because the root causes of the conflict were not properly addressed. The researcher employed a document-based study and a historical-analytical method because the conflict is very much anchored in its history. Without this, readers could not understand the root causes of the problem and the historical development of the inclusion of Mindanao into the Philippines. The data for this study are collected from both primary and secondary sources such as books, articles, journals, newspapers, government reports, non-governmental organisations’ reports, policy statements, press releases, and signed-agreements.

To describe the highlights in the personal, professional, and political life of the first Brazilian Professor of Psychiatry. The article draws on a wide range of documents: newspaper articles, documents of Brazilian medical institutions, scientific articles, theses, and books. João Carlos Teixeira Brandão was a distinguished 19th-century Brazilian psychiatrist and leader of the institutionalization and consolidation of the field of Psychiatry in Brazil. He contributed to the recognition of the professional jurisdiction of the "alienist", a specialized professional, qualified in clinical practice, diagnosis, and the definition of the boundaries between sanity and madness, based on scientific criteria, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article highlights the key moments in the professional and political career of Professor João Carlos Teixeira Brandão, from his graduation from the Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine in 1877 to his death in 1921, when he was still active in national politics.

Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery, by John Crowley (Baltimore, MD, and London, England: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 202 pp., $15.95 (paper). Listening to Lazarus: the voices of America's first drunkards There are historically obscure points where the fields of temperance history, alcohol studies, and addiction studies dramatically intersect. John Crowley has illuminated one of the earliest and most interesting of such intersections in his latest book, Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair and Recovery. This article reviews Crowley's latest contribution, analyzes the reform narratives presented in this work for their portrayal of the processes of addiction and recovery, and reflects on what these narratives tell us about the rise and fall of America's most celebrated 19th-century alcoholic mutual aid society. I. Context: the Washingtonian Movement Rising alcohol consumption and alcohol-related problems during the late 18th and early 19th centuries triggered abstinence-based cultural revitalization movements among Native American tribes and the emergence of the American temperance movement. Published stories of addiction and recovery that began to appear in the 1820s and 1830s challenged the belief that `There was hope for our friend, if the yellow fever or even the plague was upon him; but none if he became a drunkard.1,2 Reform narratives emerged as something of a cultural phenomenon after six hard cases organized their own abstinence-based mutual aid society in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1840. This society was founded on the assumption that the reformed drunkard could reach his still-drinking brethren in ways that no one else could. For the reformed inebriate knows each avenue to his brother's heart; he highly (sic] touches the strings on which hang all his sorrow; no rebuke mingles with his invitation of welcome . . . The Washington Temperance Society that was launched in Baltimore spread rapidly through the United States and at its peak claimed a membership of same 600,000-of whom 150,000 were confirmed drunkards.3, 4 The Washingtonian Movement reached its zenith in 1843 and then entered a period of rapid decline. This decline has been attributed to many factors: conflict with existing religious and temperance groups, damaged credibility resulting from the relapse of prominent members, ineffective organization, failure to maintain the original closed (drunkards only) meeting structure, internal strife (particularly debates over the role of religion in personal reformation and the advisability of the legal prohibition of alcohol), and the lack of a clearly defined long-term program of recovery.5 The Washingtonian Temperance Society placed the reformed drunkard at the head of the temperance table and used the vivid portrayal of his own fall and rebirth as an invitation for others (drunkards and moderate tipplers) to pledge themselves to lifelong abstinence from all alcoholic drink. The Washingtonians placed experience sharing at the center of the process of personal reform. During the early 1840s, Washingtonian temperance missionaries carried a message of hope to the drunkard by reaching out to those still suffering (active recruitment), by serving as traveling temperance orators, and by telling their stories of personal decline and resurrection in newspaper articles, pamphlets and books.b The most fully developed of the temperance narratives that emerged within the Washingtonian Movement are the focus of John Crowley's Drunkard's Progress. II. A brief review John Crowley is not a newcomer to the study of the portrayal of alcoholism within American literature. His book The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction was a significant contribution.' A more recent essay, comparing the narratives of John Gough and Frederick Douglass, is a remarkable piece of research that raised for the first time the question of whether Douglass should be classified as one who reformed himself from the excesses of drink and, as such, should be positioned historically as the first African American who framed abstinence within the context of cultural as well as personal survival. …

Trained at the acting school of Luigi Rasi in Florence, Amerigo Guasti affirmed himself as appreciated Brillante between 19th and 20th century. As well as being a good interpreter, he is a skilled ‘Capocomico’ and director of his own companies. Since 1906 he establishes a permanent collaboration with Dina Galli. He is also a translator and author of dramatic texts, newspaper articles and an autobiographical book.