Towards a European educational area

When negotiating the new educational programmes the Council and the Commission of the EC had to deal with a profound controversy as to whether or not the programmes should aim for the creation of a European educational area. This reflects the question of whether the Community can work towards some sort of unification of the different educational systems of the Member States. As the Treaty of the European Community prohibits any harmonisation in this field the European institutions can only work towards a growing closer of the different systems by encouraging the Member States and the educational and training institutions to go this way. Such an outcome can be fostered by the legal framework protecting the individual rights of non discrimination and of free movement of workers and of services as well as of establishment on the one side and by indirectly effective and not binding measures on the other side. This influence can be achieved by the European education programmes, the common efforts to face the challenges of the knowledge society and the global competition, the incentives to ameliorate the quality of education and training and to improve the individual employability. However, harmonisation will mean losing the richness of European diversity. Instead of unifying the systems transparency and mutual recognition of individual qualifications could lead to the desired European dimension without endangering the cultural backgrounds and the responsibility of the Member States for education and training. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Environmental migrations in Central Asia: a multifaceted approach to the issue

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, studies are considering Central Asia a ‘hot spot’ of climate change and a region prone to environmental migrations. Growing aridity and the shrinking of glaciers may have important impacts on food security, health, human security and infrastructure in the region and compel people to move. Drawing on the literature on environmental issues in Central Asia and on interviews conducted in the Kuhistoni-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan, this article provides a literature survey on environmental migrations in the region and positions Central Asia in the current debates within the broad environmental migrations literature. The article shows that environmental issues can stand out as an important push factor for out-migration in Central Asia, highlights the important role of the Soviet heritage of environmental management as well as of post-Soviet socio-economic transformations in understanding these issues, and discusses possible adaptation strategies.     

The Rise of the Genotocracy

This article examines whether meritocracy is an effective device for legitimising socioeconomic inequality. It looks at two ways in which it could be said to do that—by allocating wealth and prestige according to merit, and by creating opportunities for those born in low income families—and concludes that the first only creates the appearance of fairness (an argument made persuasively by John Rawls) and the second is a largely unfulfilled promise. The author asks whether the low levels of social mobility in Britain and America are because they have not yet become fully-fledged meritocracies, or because they have, and considers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s argument in The Bell Curve that meritocratic societies have a tendency to degenerate into genetically-based caste systems. It examines the research by Dalton Conley, Jason Fletcher and Benjamin Domingue on this point, which shows that genetic assortative mating declined over the course of the twentieth century, and tentatively concludes that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong—that flatlining social mobility is a bug, not a feature, of meritocratic societies.     

新时代的农民工回流:逻辑、错位及其平衡——基于安徽、贵州、江西三省的调查

农民工回流是社会流动的主要表现。作为历时性、空间性的社会现象,农民工回流是政府、企业、家庭、个人等多元主体共同影响的结果,与政策制度、公共服务、经济水平、技术发展、家庭功能等多种因素密切相关,由政治逻辑、市场逻辑、技术逻辑与生活逻辑综合作用而成。但是,政治逻辑和市场逻辑主导下的农民工回流更多地体现出阶段性与被动性,技术逻辑和生活逻辑的作用较为持续与稳定。要从完善农民工市民化政策体系、增强企业社会责任、提高农民工人力资本、加快乡村基础设施建设等方面保障农民工的基本权益,实现农民工“留得下、稳得住、活得好、回得去”的政策预期。     

（后）现代性与移动性：生态环境所面临的挤压——兼论旅游人类学视野中的“旅游文化”

"全球化"使得"现代人类"叙事更加充分,政治经济领域,社会文化的各个方面也出现空前的"移动-流动"景象,越来越多的人更加担心"文化的全球化"给人类所带来的隐忧.如果生物的多元性、文化的多元性、地方特色的多元性等得不到很好的保护和保存,那么,"可持续发展"的核心价值和关键意义便无以兑现.     

Family formation and everyday travel in Britain since c.1850

This paper focuses on the extent to which everyday travel behaviour in Britain changes in relation to family responsibilities, and examines how this has altered over the past century and a half. It is argued that prior to the mid-twentieth century changes in the family such as increased child-care responsibilities barely influenced the modes of transport used for everyday travel, but that increasingly in the later twentieth century people adjusted their travel behaviour during the family formation phases of the life cycle. In particular, parents of young children have become more car-dependent and less likely to walk or cycle. Data are drawn from two separate projects, one that collected travel life histories from the past half-century as context for research on cycling in later life, and one that uses personal diaries to reveal everyday mobility strategies of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is argued that the observed changes are due not only to increased access to a wide range of different transport forms, especially the motor car, but also to changes in societal perceptions of risk and norms of travel behaviour. In conclusion, it is suggested that more awareness of past travel behaviours could aid the development and implementation of more sustainable transport policies in the UK.     

Field-portable detection of fentanyl and its analogs: A review

The need to detect fentanyl and its analogs in the field is an important capability to help prevent unintentional exposure or overdose on these substances, which may result in death. Many portable methods historically used in the field by first responders and other field users to detect and identify other chemical substances, such as hazardous materials, have been applied to the detection and identification of these synthetic opioids. This paper describes field portable spectroscopic methods used for the detection and identification of fentanyl and its analogs. The methods described are automated colorimetric tests including lateral flow assays; vibrational spectroscopy (mid-infrared and Raman); gas chromatography–mass spectrometry; ion mobility spectrometry, and high-pressure mass spectrometry. In each case the background and key details of these technologies are outlined, followed by a discussion of the application of the technology in the field. Attention is paid to the analysis of complex mixtures and limits of detection, including the required spectral databases and algorithms used to interrogate these types of samples. There is also an emphasis on providing actionable information to the (likely) non-scientist operators of these instruments in the field.     

The problem with English(es) and linguistic (in)justice. Addressing the limits of liberal egalitarian accounts of language

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist account of language – by which language is viewed only in terms of its communicative uses and reach and not in relation to its symbolic and identity functions. Second is his simplistic advocacy of English as a global lingua franca, which ignores issues of power and inequality, along with related delimited access to high-status English language varieties. Third are the inherent limitations associated with his advocacy of linguistic territoriality, which recognizes state-sanctioned languages but little else, thus failing to mitigate existing linguistic hierarchies. Finally, the wider argument for English as a global lingua franca is inevitably underpinned by a monolithic/hegemonic view of English itself. This monolithic conception of English stands in contradistinction, not only to the actual plethora of Englishes in the world today, but also, more importantly, to their widely varying status and use in furthering cross-communication and related notions of social and economic mobility. The latter thus fatally undermines Van Parijs’s central argument linking social and economic mobility ineluctably to access to English.     

HOPE VI–a viable strategy for improving neighborhood conditions and resident self-sufficiency? The case of Maverick Gardens in Boston

This article considers whether the HOPE VI program has achieved two of its key goals: improving neighborhood conditions and increasing resident self-sufficiency. Findings from the Maverick Gardens HOPE VI program in Boston, Massachusetts are presented and discussed in the context of other research on HOPE VI and other relocation initiatives.

Evidence from the Boston site affirms that the combination of relocation and redevelopment can lead to dramatic improvements in neighborhood quality for many – but not all – residents. Self-sufficiency outcomes, on the other hand, were not achieved: employment did not change, job networks were not expanded to new neighbors, and some residents experienced a decline in economic stability as a result of the program. Why HOPE VI has failed to improve neighborhood conditions for all residents and why it has failed to impact resident self-sufficiency is discussed, and how program goals and strategies might be adjusted to make it more effective is considered.