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What can be the contribution of oral history to the interpretation of tangible cultural assets? Starting from this conceptual question, this article focuses on the case study of the experiences Second World War in Naples bomb shelters, recently included within the Underground Built Heritage (UBH) class. The hypothesis of the research is that bomb shelters are very significant elements in the subsoil of Naples but that, due to the lack of distinctive elements and dedicated storytelling, they are only partially exploited in the context of urban parks or generic itineraries Naples's subsoil. The thesis of the research is that the memories of those children that took refuge there during World War II (WWII), which were collected with the adoption of the oral history methodology, can integrate their value as elements of local cultural heritage and eventually support their interpretation for the benefit of the new generations. The methodology adopted was the collection, via structured and unstructured interviews, of the direct testimonies of those who took refuge in Naples' underground during the alarms. Twenty-three interviews were carried out, and all the issues introduced have been classified according to the various themes addressed during the narration in order to allow the reconstruction of dedicated storytelling in the future. The research was carried out immediately after the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that claimed many victims belonging to the generation of our witnesses, whose memories were at risk of being lost forever. © 2023 by the author.
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M. F. K. Fisher's food memoirs have been interpreted as works that possess literary sta-tus. Fisher's 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, a collection of essays about food rationing during World War II, became popular again during the 2020 lockdown because it pro-vided a timely reflection on the domestic kitchen as a shelter in uncertain times. This article includes an overview of food writing as a genre and considers the relevance of Fisher's book through the concepts of healthism and hypervigilant subject, which are involved in contemporary discourses on eating and the human body. My analysis aims to demonstrate that How to Cook a Wolf invites its readers to reconcile with their appetite and their corporeality and to chase the new perils away with the delight and soothing ability to eat amid periods of crisis. © 2023, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. All rights reserved.
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Families have always been vulnerable. They have long been torn apart by the mass migrations of warfare, the oppression of minority groups, the closure of international borders and the refugee crises governed ‘from above'. Families have also always been powerful symbols. Nationalist–populist movements have capitalised on fears about familial decline and liberal democracies have built moralistic views of the family into their welfare systems. Yet, this special issue aims to demonstrate that families have not merely been objects or subjects buffeted by political and social change. Rather, families have also consistently acted as ‘agents of change'. This is not to valorise the family – families have been patriarchal, damaging and oppressive as well as supportive, empowering and caring. However, this is to say that historical work must take ‘the family' seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change.
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Amerika'nın Íkinci Dünya Savaşı'ndan bu yana dünya çapında hakim bir güç olarak ortaya çıkışı, bazı tarihsel tecrübeler ışıǧında incelenmesi gereken bir konudur. Íkinci Dünya Savaşı'nın ardından ABD dünyanın çöken uluslararası para ve finans sistemini yeniden kurmuş, böylelikle lider pozisyonda olacaǧı uluslararası kapitalist sistemi oluşturmuştur. Gömülü liberalizm, ekonomik, politik ve kurumsal bir örgütlenme stratejisi olarak ABD hegemonyasını saǧlamlaştırarak istikrarlı bir hale getirmiş, uluslararası sistemde ABD'nin başrol oynadıǧı bir küresel ekonominin somutlaşmasının koşullarını yaratmıştır. 1970'lerin ortalarından itibaren ise-neoliberal politikalara geçişin doǧal bir sonucu olarak, dünya ekonomisinin finans kapital ile karakterize bir birikim rejimine entegrasyonunun ardından, parçalanmış finansal liberalizmin ABD hegemonyasının devamlılıǧını saǧlayacak yeni bir strateji olarak etkisini göstermeye başladıǧı anlaşılmıştır. Çalışma, ABD hegemonyasının ortaya çıkışından günümüze kadar uzanan zaman diliminde, ABD'nin hegemonik stratejisinde meydana gelen deǧişimi açıklama sorunsalından hareket etmiştir. Bu sorunsal baǧlamında, ABD hegemonik stratejisinin gömülü liberalizmden parçalanmış finansal liberalizme kayışı ve bu kayışı belirleyen temel dinamikler tarihsel perspektif ekseninde irdelenmiştir.Alternate :The emergence of the United States (US) as the worldwide dominant power is an affair that needs to be investigated in light of some historical experiences. Afterward the Second World War, the US reestablished the world's deteriorating international monetary and financial system. Embedded liberalism reinforced and stabilized the US hegemony (as the form of economic, political, and institutional organization) by generating the requirements for consolidating the global economy in which the US takes a leading role. From the mid-1970s, after integrating the world economy into an accumulation regime characterized by finance capital-as, a natural consequence of the transition to neoliberal policies-it was understood that fragmented financial liberalism began to show its effect as a new strategy that would ensure the continuity of the US hegemony. The study has departed from the problematic of elucidating the change in the hegemonic strategy of the US from its birth to the present day. In this problematic context, the shift of the US hegemonic strategy from embedded liberalism to disembedded financial liberalism and the central dynamics determining this shift is examined in the axis of historical perspective.
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This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation, highlighting the extension of counseling services and psychological vocabulary that affected evaluations of nervousness;the impact of negative developments like crime rates and growing family instability;and the results both of changes in educational patterns—such as more frequent examinations—and significant shifts in student goals and expectations. Finally, the article touches on efforts to mitigate anxiety, such as expanding student services, and also their limited impact.
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Este documento aborda lo que considero los principales problemas del mundo, aunque reconozco que también hay otros problemas en la actualidad, como la inflación y la guerra en Ucrania. Intentaré abordar los principales problemas, que son de interés para el CIRIEC, que es una organización internacional que presta especial atención a lo que se denomina el Tercer Sector" o "Economía Social", un área que se sitúa entre el sector empresarial privado y el gobierno a pesar de que no soy, debo admitirlo, un experto en este último campo. Lo trataré en el contexto de la discusión de un par de problemas a los que nos enfrentamos en el mundo y que me parecen realmente importantes. El primer problema es la desigualdad económica, de la que sé algo. El segundo problema es el cambio climático y los problemas medioambientales, que creo que son los más importantes. También me referiré al final a algunos problemas relacionados con la pandemia del COVID. En todos los problemas, lo que podríamos llamar el Tercer Sector puede desempeñar un gran papel.Alternate :This paper addresses what I consider to be the world's main problems, although I recognise that there are also other problems at present, such as inflation and the war in Ukraine. I will try to address the main problems, which are of interest to CIRIEC, which is an international organisation that pays particular attention to what is called the Third Sector" or "Social Economy", an area that lies between the private business sector and the government despite I am not, I must admit, an expert in this last field. I will deal with it in the context of discussing a couple of problems we face in the world that I think are really important. The first problem is economic inequality, which I know something about. The second problem is climate change and environmental problems, which I think are the most important. I will also refer at the end to some problems related to the COVID pandemic. In all the problems, what we could call the Third Sector can play a big role.
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Da Mette Frederiksen lukkede ned for det danske samfund i midten af marts måned 2020 – som respons på den globale coronapandemi – var det en historisk uset grad af intervention på det danske arbejdsmarked, der medførte en næsten øjeblikkelig nedlukning for mange danske arbejdspladser både i det private og det offentlige. Det var på mange måder en usædvanlig beslutning, som fik store konsekvenser på stort set alle samfundsområder. Siden anden Verdenskrig, har der ikke været gennemført så pludselige og omfattende ændringer af arbejdsvilkår og arbejdets organisering med konsekvenser for de sociale relationer på arbejdspladser og for forholdene på arbejdsmarkedet mere generelt, som det skete under coronapandemien. I starten steg arbejdsløsheden voldsomt, og man indførte en række hjælpepakker til både virksomheder og lønmodtagere, som blev hjemsendt, f.eks. den såkaldte lønkompensation som skulle holde hånden under de ansatte i særligt udsatte brancher. Denne tilgang var ikke unik for Danmark. Alternate abstract:When Mette Frederiksen shut down Danish society in mid-March 2020 – in response to the global corona pandemic – it was a historically unprecedented degree of intervention in the Danish labor market, which led to an almost immediate shutdown of many Danish workplaces both in the private and the public sector. It was in many ways an unusual decision, which had major consequences in virtually all areas of society. Since the Second World War, there have not been such sudden and comprehensive changes to working conditions and the organization of work with consequences for social relations at workplaces and for conditions on the labor market more generally, as happened during the corona pandemic. At the start, unemployment rose sharply, and a number of aid packages were introduced for both companies and wage earners, who were sent home, e.g. the so-called wage compensation, which was supposed to hold the hand of the employees in particularly vulnerable industries. This approach was not unique to Denmark.
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Institutions have been described as essential patterns of behavior that come to support a society and are generally understood and agreed upon in their roles. They can include behaviors that individuals must participate in as in rites of passage in religion, or in the use of money or joining a military or providing labor for communal structures or means as in irrigation. When one segment of a society comes to disagree with the goals of institutions and withdraws support or actively attacks one or more, it threatens not only the existence of the institution but the society as an organization. Often in history, revolutions are built on such attacks as in those of the Optimates in Ancient Rome or the Bolsheviks in Russia. The attack on the medical profession in the United States has been one that has a longer history, one bracketed in disbelief in science in general and has set the two institutions of religion and medicine at odds. An underfunded medical profession has faced the pandemic in a cloud of conspiracy theories that question even the purpose or need for medicine. The consequences during Covid-19 have been catastrophic by many assessments.
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BOOK REVIEW Many different kinds of love: A story of life, death and the NHS by Michael Rosen Elma Burger Netcare Rehab Hospital, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, South Africa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1062-5576 AUTHOR: The Review The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England. The author begins by describing the battle to access health care due to the extreme pressure on the NHS during the peak of the virus. Elma Burger Netcare Rehab Hospital, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, South Africa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1062-5576 AUTHOR: The Review The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England. The author begins by describing the battle to access health care due to the extreme pressure on the NHS during the peak of the virus.
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Halfway into White Noise, Don DeLillo's novel from 1985, Jack Gladney packs his family in the car and leaves town running from a black chemical cloud. The "airborne toxic event” had triggered an emergency evacuation plan: floodlights from helicopters, sirens, unmarked cars from obscure agencies, clogged roads, makeshift shelters at a Boy Scout camp where the Red Cross would dispense juice and coffee. People are confused, they seek information wherever they can, "[s]mall crowds collected around certain men.” Among generalized bewilderment, Gladney observes a few individuals moving faster and more assertively than the rest, then getting into a Land Rover. In the chaotic scene of crisis, their confidence gets his attention. "Their bumper stickers read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL” Gladney reads. And his mind wanders: "In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They've practiced staying alive.”
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The current system of multilateralism, borne out of circumstances after the Second World War, is no longer fit for purpose today. How should this system be reinvented, and what types of research can contribute to its reform? First, it is not enough to tell international organizations that they ought to do more of the same good things such as transparency and engagement;rather, we need contextually grounded and publicly engaged research that helps practitioners dispel tropes and elevate public discourse in a deeply politicized world. Second, being public in nature, international organizations cannot be expected to operate like private firms. Any prescription must take into account their political imperatives. Publicly engaged research on multilateralism should move in three directions: (a) take US-China great power competition as a necessary starting point;(b) support ethnographic and empirical research that sheds light on internal operations, political dynamics, and constraints within international organizations;(c) promote dialogues between academics and practitioners, as this special collection has done.
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Group testing was conceived during World War II to identify soldiers infected with syphilis using as few tests as possible, and it has attracted renewed interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. A long-standing assumption in the probabilistic variant of the group testing problem is that individuals are infected by the disease independently. However, this assumption rarely holds in practice, as diseases often spread through interactions between individuals and therefore cause infections to be correlated. Inspired by characteristics of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, we introduce an infection model over networks which generalizes the traditional i.i.d. model from probabilistic group testing. Under this model, we ask whether knowledge of the network structure can be leveraged to perform group testing more efficiently, focusing specifically on community-structured graphs drawn from the stochastic block model. We prove that a simple community-aware algorithm outperforms the baseline binary splitting algorithm when the model parameters are conducive to “strong community structure.”Moreover, our novel lower bounds imply that the community-aware algorithm is order-optimal in certain parameter regimes. We extend our bounds to the noisy setting and support our results with numerical experiments. IEEE
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‘Development' is a legal concept which has been central to the practice of international economic law (IEL). This Article examines how ‘development' continues to be at the heart of struggles between domestic investment laws (DILs) and international economic law. By examining over 3000 international investment agreements (IIAs) and DILs signed in the last seven decades, this Article identifies the ways in which the concept of development has evolved in tandem with the growth of international economic law by dividing the history of international investment law into six main phases. It traces the emergence of ‘development' in DIL to the decolonization era arguing that post 1990, the proliferation of international investment treaties and growth of investment treaty arbitration have been used as tools of liberalization on the weak premise that this would lead to economic development. In this context, this Article examines closely the interpretation of ‘investment' by ICSID tribunals, promotion of international arbitration for economic development, attempts to internationalize economic development contracts, continued relevance of the New International Economic Order, and shift to sustainable development in IEL discourse.
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In December 2021 a famous Greek TV and radio journalist and well-known anti-vaxxer, Yiorgos Tragkas, passed away due to Covid-19 complications. In the previous two decades, Tragkas had become a controversial figure, employing an anti-elite, pro-Russian and anti-Western narrative that fed into the country's underdog culture. His ethnocentric, populist, toxic tabloid journalism had been a popular genre in Greek political culture since the early 1980s. However, the debt and migration crises that shook Greece fuelled populist politics and a wave of misinformation.1 Tragkas jumped on the bandwagon of this new era by whitewashing the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party on national TV and by live appearances dressed up as a Second World War Nazi officer, with photos of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel on his desk.
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In popular culture the generation that lived through the Great Depression and World War II is often mythologized. THE PASSING OF A MYTHOLOGIZED GENERATION According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), just 325,574 of more than 16 million World War II veterans remained alive in 2020, before Covid-19 dramatically thinned their ranks. The passing of this generation exacerbates the romanticism attached to those who endured both the Great Depression and world war. [...]films were regularly recycled on television, where my father viewed them numerous times.1 In 1998, he made a rare trip to the cinema to see Saving Private Ryan, although he had been cautioned not to go as he was suffering from heart disease.
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While access to library and archival collections in mainland China remains unclear due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and increasing government scrutiny, past experiences in Chinese archives are still relevant for scholars going forward, in the event that the People's Republic of China reopens the doors to these collections. In surveying the digital, print publication, and manuscript collections pertaining to the Chinese history of World War ii, this article shows how access to new kinds of sources redefined the pre-pandemic state of the field. In particular, curated volumes that emphasized perspectives from the Chinese Communist Party and leftist intellectuals gradually have given way to a more representative collection of the documentary evidence, and Taiwanese collections continue to be important to the historiography. The article begins with coverage of well-known guides and published catalogues of mainland and Taiwanese collections. It then covers some military documents that Chinese scholars occasionally have referenced. It emphasizes the richness of accessible material on the social and cultural history of the war era as part of a call to colleagues and future students to expand the scope of what is traditionally thought to be "military history.” There is ample opportunity for major interventions into our understanding of wartime China, which shaped the course of modern history overall, and major innovations in historiography that scholars usually make from the dusty reading rooms of the libraries and archives. © Aaron William Moore, 2022
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This paper applies an endogenous institutionalist framework to understand the evolution of the rules‐based international trading system since the end of World War II. We argue that the initial success of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and re‐enforcement that led to the formation of the WTO can be explained by three major factors: the hegemonic position of the US, the belief that international trade would foster prosperity and peace, and Cold War politics. However, declining US hegemony along with a shift in global comparative advantage in labor‐intensive manufacturing led to a shift from multilateral towards preferential trade agreements since the 1990s. Today, the WTO faces several new challenges, including increasing geo‐political competition between the US and China, increasing digitization of commerce, and disrupted supply chains following COVID‐19. A functioning WTO that facilitates global economic re‐integration remains crucial to ensure a strong recovery from the pandemic and continued long‐term prosperity and stability of the global economy.
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US National Security Strategy adopted in October 2022. highlights the complex security challenges in Eurasia that pose a threat to US global dominance. What does the new US national security strategy mean for the EU? Namely, until recently the concept of European strategic autonomy, which affirmed not only the military, but also the specific economic interests of the EU, was marginalized by the Ukrainian crisis. Thus, in the context of the comprehensive destabilization of Europe, the security architecture of the continent is shaped by the instruments of the American security strategy, which is not always compatible with the interests of the EU. Namely, the US National Security Strategy significantly determine the geopolitical possibilities of the European Union, which is facing the deepest crisis since the Second World War.
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Can visual interaction with artwork prompt healing? Can the brain recover from traumatic experiences and help heal the whole body? Since the 1940s, art therapists have claimed that the production of art can help heal past traumas. Similarly, occupational therapists have employed techniques from arts and crafts since the end of World War II to retrain soldiers helping them recover from the trauma of war. The global Covid-19 pandemic has caused health-related and psychological problems-isolation, increased anxiety, and fear-for people of all ages, with the rates of such traumas affecting children tripling over the past two years. According to the Nebraska-based quilting company, Accuquilt, during the first six months of pandemic isolation in 2020, sales more than doubled as new customers showed a desire to participate in arts and crafts from home. This essay explores various approaches to the arts to determine how art may restore dignity and health following traumatic experiences.