Whole-person health and development: two South Indian initiatives

ABSTRACT

In responding to the 2016 reformulation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the development community’s efforts are focused on a sweep of initiatives aiming to promote whole-society, sustainable development. The ambition of the SDGs is inspiring, but also daunting, and does not always sit easily within national models of economic development. This viewpoint profiles two organisations in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, that have decades of experience in whole-person development among scheduled tribes and disability communities. Both organisations serve as timely examples of ongoing holistic, whole-person health and development in the context of new ideals and economic realities.     

Developing urban space: the changing role of NGOs in Bangladesh

Rapid urbanisation has been an emerging issue in recent decades, particularly for developing countries such as Bangladesh. As one of world’s largest international NGOs, BRAC, based in Bangladesh, is transiting towards a more integrated approach for alleviating urban poverty. This article presents BRAC’s current journey for eradicating urban poverty and outlines the characteristics of urban poverty, key issues faced by the urban poor, and learning that BRAC has accumulated through its urban interventions. Introducing the concept of “coproduction”, the article identifies BRAC’s priorities to eradicate urban poverty within the context of an overall urban strategy.     

Resistance and Creativity in Social Interaction: For and Against Memory in Poland, Israel–Palestine, and the United States

In this paper, I present an analysis of Adam Michnik’s notion of “Amnesty without Amnesia”. His was a wise political judgment presented at a critical moment in the struggle to constitute a democratic polity in Poland. Mine is an appreciation of his political position, along with a sociological analysis that highlights the empirical difficulties of its realization in practical action. I will show how at critical moments of social change creative political action works to erase memories of the relevant past, which act as a repressive force, while “re-remembering” (to use Toni Morrison’s formulation). Three cases will be compared, Michnik’s, after the fall of the communist regime in east central Europe, and cases drawn from the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the American presidential campaign. A paper prepared for presentation at Cerisy, France, Summer, 2008.     

企业与利益相关者关系的重新定位——基于哈贝马斯对话伦理的研究

企业与利益相关者关系的理论分析主要集于工具性视角与规范性视角.工具性视角以经济绩效为追求,由于未更好地嵌入规范的社会理论当中,其目的虽明确但方向却不然.规范性视角以阐明企业经营中利益相关者参与的应然内涵为己任,其超然的独白角色难免冷落的际遇.利益相关者的实践模式亦须超越.藉由对话伦理的分析,为重新定位和探索企业与利益相关者的关系提供了新机遇,无论是对利益相关者理论的理路承接,还是对既有命题的逻辑阐释,都显示较强的逻辑自洽性.进一步,由此构建的对话实现框架,为企业经营实践提供了新参照.这些都为进一步反思当前企业社会责任的若干问题给予了深刻警醒.     

论"东盟经济共同体": 必然性、可行性与挑战

本文主要从三个方面对"东盟经济共同体"构想进行分析,认为首先应了解"东盟经济共同体"是一个必然的趋势和必须的选择;而东盟合作机制的完善和区域经济一体化的加速则为"东盟经济共同体"提供了可行基础.但同时,东盟各成员国经济发展水平及贸易开放程度的差异、经济上较高的竞争性以及"东盟方式"也对其形成了一些挑战.因此,东盟最终会建成一个经济共同体,只是过程比较曲折.     

福建省明溪县新移民社会调查

本文在实地调查的基础上,分析了福建"旅欧第一县"明溪县内陆新侨乡的形成、发展过程.针对我国改革开放后不断涌现的新移民现象,注重从一个新兴侨乡的视角来剖析新移民产生的原因及对当地社会所产生的影响,并力图寻求伴随新移民现象产生的诸多问题解决的方式、方法.     

Political attitude estimation through Facebook like: a South Korean case study

Recently numerous studies are conducted to estimate the human personality from the online social activities. This paper develops a comprehensive model for political attitude estimation leveraging the Facebook Like information of the users. We designed a Facebook Crawler that efficiently collects data overcoming the difficulties in crawling Ajax enabled Facebook pages. We show that the category level selection can reduce the data analysis complexity utilizing the sparsity of the huge like-attitude matrix. In the Korean Facebook users’ context, only 28 criteria (3% of the total) can estimate the political polarity of the user with high accuracy (AUC of 0.82).     

Accountability mechanisms in community-driven reconstruction in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

A lack of accountability is often considered a root cause of conflict. Many post-conflict reconstruction efforts therefore aim to enhance accountability between authorities and the population through community-driven reconstruction programmes. This article examines the accountability mechanisms in the Tushiriki community-driven reconstruction programme in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnographic research found little impact of formal programme accountability. Rather, accountability was shaped differently and had its own context-specific meaning. To make accountability more sustainable, stronger embeddedness in local institutions and more appropriate translations of abstract concepts into the local context are needed.     

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left*

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.