Covid-19 Vaccination Stance Detection Using Natural Language Processing and Machine-Learning Algorithms

The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in unprecedented measures, forcing authorities to make decisions related to establishing lockdowns in areas most affected by the pandemic. Social Media have supported people during this difficult time. On November 9, 2020, when the first vaccine with an efficacy rate over 90% was announced, social media reacted and people around the world began to express their feelings about this vaccination. This paper aims to analyze the dynamics of opinion on COVID-19 vaccination, in which the civil society is highly manifested in the vaccination process. We compared classical machine learning algorithms to select the best performing classifier. 4,392 tweets were collected and analyzed. The proposed approach can help governments create and evaluate appropriate communication tools to provide clear and relevant information to the general public, increasing public confidence in vaccination campaigns. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Pandemic and the Administrative Rationality: Understanding the Administrative Response to the Pandemic

The outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 or COVID 19 pandemic has literally dashed our enlightened scientific rationality. It has claimed more than six million lives around the globe. The struggling humanity has adopted a series of strict legal-administrative protocols like lockdown, quarantine, isolation, to contain the spread of the virus. However, the strict adherence to the above-mentioned protocols has brought several collateral damages like the disruption of normal socio-economic activities;suspension of political and civic engagements of the people. The situation gets further complicated as endless suggestions and opinions have been offered by several experts. The scientific community, till today, is grappling with the possible antidote of the virus in the form of vaccines. Several research laboratories across the globe have been actively engaged in devising full-proof vaccines of which, some have already started manufacturing commercially. Despite the tall claims of these companies, the efficacy of these vaccines is still not very clear. Moreover, the modality of administering these vaccines is another difficult issue, involving delicate distributive management that requires something more than mere scientific rationality. Further, given the nature of neoliberal governance, where delivery of services is a collective venture of all the stakeholders like state, civil society, market, and community, administrative rationality is perhaps the most important means. Drawing on the existing literature, the paper intends to explore the administrative responses to the pandemic of COVID-19 through the lens of administrative rationality. Finally, the paper with an optimistic note concludes that the administrative rationality of the bureaucracy has the potential to devise a bailout programme for all the stakeholders concerned. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022, corrected publication 2022.

Opening industry data: The private sector's role in addressing societal challenges

This commentary explores the potential of private companies to advance scientific progress and solve social challenges through opening and sharing their data. Open data can accelerate scientific discoveries, foster collaboration, and promote long-term business success. However, concerns regarding data privacy and security can hinder data sharing. Companies have options to mitigate the challenges through developing data governance mechanisms, collaborating with stakeholders, communicating the benefits, and creating incentives for data sharing, among others. Ultimately, open data has immense potential to drive positive social impact and business value, and companies can explore solutions for their specific circumstances and tailor them to their specific needs.

Regional consultation on enhancing the capacity of Member States to implement anti-stigma programmes in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

[...]the economic downturns, social polarization, public health emergencies, widespread humanitarian emergencies, forced displacement, climate crises, and even COVID-19 are major threats to mental health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. The Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2030 (8), the Regional Framework to Scaleup Action on Mental Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (9), the World Mental Health Report (10), and the associated tools and resources published by WHO provide strategic directions for addressing stigma and discrimination. Recommendations Through outreach activities and advocacy at national and subnational levels, Member States are to strengthen multisectoral partnerships, including with people who experience mental health disorders and their support networks, to leverage scarce resources for mental health and integrate anti-stigma actions into mental health law, policies, and interventions.

Keeping an open venue and working face to face during the Covid-19 outbreak: challenges for civil society organizations working with people living precarious lives in Sweden

This article examines how representatives of Swedish civil society organisations (CSOs) reflected on and acted to provide daily functional social work to people living precarious lives during the early phase (March-April 2020) of the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden. The empirical material consists of 20 qualitative interviews with representatives of CSOs. The results highlight how the CSOs, and their venues, constituted a safe place where visitors were considered grievable and that working face-to-face with the visitors was deemed necessary. However, the pandemic posed challenges for how the CSOs were used to organise their social work, while many visitors lacked other alternatives. When Covid-19 hit, it meant adapting and responding to deliver well-functioning social work and a place for people lacking other alternatives despite the pandemic. The measures taken implied possible challenges to the relationship between the CSOs and their visitors. Still, there were indications that the visitors saw the measures as a protection, as rituals of grievability. However, not all measures were welcomed by the representatives or visitors. Turning people away or prioritising among visitors were challenging and cannot always be said to frame people as grievable. Regardless, it seems that the challenging measures taken during the pandemic were already embedded in everyday practices where the visitors were treated relationally and considered grievable before the pandemic. This embeddedness made it possible to extend grievability throughout the pandemic, even when social distancing measures were used, thus emphasising the importance of places of grievability being accessible to people before societal crises occur. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

A call for food system change

[...]the UK meets more of its food needs, the country risks having potentially counterfeit food imports and disrupted supply chains. The book describes relevant aspects of British food history, defines terms, lists foods imported and exported, measures freight shipped through UK airports, defines greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and crop production, documents food price trends, gives feed conversion rates for food animals, lists advertising spending by major food companies, explains water rights, and states how much land is owned by the British aristocracy, corporations, and Crown. Lang was a member of the EAT-Lancet Commission and he calls on the UK Government to adopt the Commission's Great Food Transformation recommendations to improve public health, the environment, food citizenship, wage scales, and democratic accountability, and to redistribute power in the food system.

Multilevel governance, community and emergency management during the pandemic: migrants in Japan

PurposeBuilding on perspectives from the study of multilevel governance, migrants' inclusion and emergency management, this article asks how differences across national regulations for foreign residents, work eligibility and access to national emergency supports intersected with local approaches in responding to migrants.Design/methodology/approachThis article examines national policy adjustments and parallel subnational governance early in the pandemic for three groups of foreign residents: international students, technical interns and co-ethnics with long-term visas, primarily Brazilians and Peruvians. It uses Japanese-language documents to trace national policy responses. To grasp subnational governance, the article analyzes coverage in six Japanese regional newspapers from northern, central and western Japan, for the period of April 1 to October 1, 2020.FindingsNational policies obstructed or enabled migrants' treatment as members of the local community but did not dictate this membership, which varied according to migrant group. Migrants' relationship to the community affected available supports.Originality/valueThe article brings together perspectives on multilevel governance, emergency management and migrants' inclusion. It exposes how different migrant groups' ties to the local community affected access to supports.

Civil society priorities for global health: concepts and measurement.

The global health agenda-a high stakes process in which problems are defined and compete for the kind of serious attention that promises to help alleviate inequities in the burden of disease-is comprised of priorities set within and among a host of interacting stakeholder arenas. This study informs crucial and unanswered conceptual and measurement questions with respect to civil society priorities in global health. The exploratory two-stage inquiry probes insights from experts based in four world regions and pilots a new measurement approach, analysing nearly 20 000 Tweets straddling the COVID-19 pandemic onset from a set of civil society organizations (CSOs) engaged in global health. Expert informants discerned civil society priorities principally on the basis of observed trends in CSO and social movement action, including advocacy, programme, and monitoring and accountability activities-all of which are widely documented by CSOs active on Twitter. Systematic analysis of a subset of CSO Tweets shows how their attention to COVID-19 soared amidst mostly small shifts in attention to a wide range of other issues between 2019 and 2020, reflecting the impacts of a focusing event and other dynamics. The approach holds promise for advancing measurement of emergent, sustained and evolving civil society priorities in global health.

Civil society diplomacy: characterizing collective and connective actions for a shared cause

PurposeThis study proposes a description of the civil society diplomacy that emerged in the early solutions found to fight the COVID-19 crisis. The author analyses this concept as the intersection of the social movements of individuals and civil society organisations' and international health care. Its purpose is to determine the international structure of the connective actors aimed to find concrete solutions against COVID-19 and to characterize the communication visible on Twitter towards this civil society engagement.Design/methodology/approachBased on a data-driven approach, the author collected a large dataset of tweets from Switzerland between March and June 2020 and conducted a computational text analysis methodology.FindingsThe results showed who the participants were, provided a visualisation of the digital networking process between engaged and mentioned participants at national and international levels, and determined the emotions that emerged during three event phases.Originality/valueThe study reveals that features of connective social care actions and strategic collective communication can illustrate civil society diplomacy for a shared cause in times of health crisis.

No Longer 'Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards'? Advances in Local State-Voluntary and Community Sector Relationships During Covid-19

Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis response. This paper draws upon 49 semi-structured interviews with local authorities (LAs) and VCS organisations across England, Scotland and Wales, to explore how the pandemic has reshaped LA-VCS collaboration. Examining the evolution of a range of local collaborative frameworks during the Covid-19 crisis, the article examines what enabled these collaborations to develop, how they operated and what insights can be derived regarding both the conditions for collaboration to flourish and the capacity to sustain this going forward. The findings offer insights into what more progressive forms of collaboration might look like during the transition from crisis and into recovery. It contributes to broader debates about whether the models deployed during Covid-19 represent a pathway to more consensus-based collaboration after a decade of antagonism between civil society and the state.

Insights into the Activities of Civil Society in Croatia during the Pandemic of the Covid-19 Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic that started at the beginning of 2020 has put great constraints and significant challenges in organization of social and economic life. This paper analyses the civil society response to the COVID-19 pandemic and presents specific adaptations and opportuni-ties to contribute to the society in the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.The stories that civil society organizations published on the webpage ZADobroBIT.hr have been analysed by the means of a qualitative research. Thematic analysis in different scopes of activities shows that civil society organizations were more focused on the general population and various vulnerable groups. Vulnerable groups were recognized as those needing particular additional support in the course of this period. The activities aiming at general population fo-cused on newly emerged needs related to civil protection. Civil society also worked on keeping the everyday routines in communities by conducting various types of activities. Informing and educating aimed at creating new and maintaining existing information and education-al practices that adapted to pandemic circumstances. The results of the research show also that organizations have significantly changed, and quickly adapted their work with the help of technology and by using volunteer work.The results of the analysis suggest that civil society has proved flexible and able to respond quickly to emerging social needs, but also emphasized the contextual limitations of the ac-tions. Thus, the paper discusses the position and role of civil society in the "new normal ", and the impact it has on its further development in the Croatian social and political environment.

Energy sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and climate change in Cuba: between public policies and civil society projects from 1959 to the pandemic stage

The search for solutions to global environmental change has been a concern of the Cuban State and government since the early years of the revolutionary process. Fact that is evidenced in the environmental projection, through the conception of public policies aimed at reversing its deterioration and promoting sustainable practices from the ecological, economic, social and cultural aspects, even in difficult contexts such as the well-known Special Period and the current pandemic generated by the Covid-19. The country's bets are not only made from a centralized and vertical approach, which respond to national and international scenarios and specific situations, but also through self-managed processes from civil society where horizontality and multi-actor dialogue prevail in in order to achieve a system based on social and environmental justice that articulates multiple institutions and collective subjects. The following work, from a qualitative and quantitative methodology, addresses the concrete impacts and the transformative capacity of the public policies outlined by the country, from the revolutionary triumph to the context of the pandemic in terms of energy sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and climate change. Analysis that is enriched with the visibility of projects created from civil society in pursuit of achieving the necessary eco-social transformation. Imbrication that provides an overview of the progress and challenges of public policies in conjunction with projects promoted by civil society in environmental matters, and has the novelty of interrelating processes aimed at reversing environmental conditions framed within dissimilar historical contexts, thus reflecting the broad struggle in the face of global environmental change within the revolutionary process.

Populism and Its Definitions: Interpretations and Perspectives of a Multifaceted Political Model

This chapter deals with some of the many definitions of populism, starting with the first event in which a community of researchers came together for this purpose: the 1967 London Conference ‘To Define Populism'. The text follows the evolution of the central themes to the present day and explores, in particular, the tools produced by populism studies that help to understand two contemporary challenges: first, the emergence of new forms of populism fragmented into antagonistic groups during the SarsCoV2 Pandemic, but linked to broader authoritarian visions, and second, the new reflection on the principle of nationality and international solidarity that arose after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. Both are challenges to the principles, intelligence and strength of democracies. This text focuses on two aspects in particular: first, the logic with which to construct definitions, so as to avoid errors of setting (unclear and ill-defined choice of subject to be studied), elaboration (conceptual stretching) and evaluation (researcher bias), and second, the understanding of the different identities with which the ‘people' presents itself and acts historically: populace, mob, civil society and revolutionary people;they cannot be confused within the same ‘populism'. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS

Democracy Worldwide v. United States No. 20-782C Filed: September 30, 2020· OPINION BLAKE, J. This case arises out of a grant awarded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to Democracy Worldwide (DW), as authorized by the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020, Pub. USAID sought applications for programs to increase protection for human rights defenders through various methods, including, but not limited to, strengthening civil society capacity to conduct civic education and activism, bolstering protections for journalists and human rights advocates, and conducting strategic civil and human rights-based litigation. [...]DW's Program Manager, Amanda McDowell, contacted Justin Baird, the Agreements Officer Representative (AOR) at USAID, to alert him that the training would need to make certain adjustments. The cheapest option per mask was a manufacturer that required a 500-mask minimum. Because the COVID-19 pandemic appeared that it would last beyond the first training, DW decided to order 500 masks.

BRIEF OF CONTRACTOR-APPELLANT, DEMOCRACY WORLDWIDE

Dep'ts and Agencies (Jan. 05, 2021), https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01 /M-21-11.pdf 226 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), USAID (Mar. 21, 2020), https:/ www.usaid.gov/coronavirus [http://web.archive.org /web/20200321032153] 217 U.S. Gov't Accountability Off., GAO-12-331G, Government Auditing Standards (2018) 218 OTHER AUTHORITIES Advice on the Use of Masks in the Community, During Home Care, and in Health Care Settings in the Context of COVID-19, WHO (Mar. 19, 2020), https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331493 /WHO-2019-nCoV-IPC_Masks-2020.2-eng.pdf?sequence= 14&isAllowed=y 218 Amindeh Blaise Atabong, In Cameroon, Face Masks Are Compulsory-But Unaffordable for Many, Mail & Guardian (Apr. 18, 2020), https:// mg.co.za/article/2020-04-18-in-cameroon-face-masks-are -compulsory-but-unaffordable-for-many 217, 218 Cost of Living in Yaounde, Numbeo, https://www.numbeo.com/cost -of-living/in/Yaounde-Cameroon (last visited Mar. 5, 2021) 218 Fadela Chaib, Shortage of Personal Protective Equipment Endangering Health Workers Worldwide, WHO (Mar. 02, 2020), https://www .who.int/news/item/03-03-2020-shortage-of-personal-protective -equipment-endangering-health-workers-worldwide 217 How COVID-19 Spreads, CDC (last updated Oct. 28, 2020), https:// www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how -COVID-spreads.html. 216 How Much Water Do You Use at Home?, U.S. Geological Surv. (last visited Mar. 5, 2021), https://water.usgs.gov/edu/activity -percapita.php 218 Scott S. Sheffler, A Reasoned Case for a "Grant Disputes Act," 47 Pub. L.J. 209 (2018) 207 STATEMENT OF RELATED CASES Pursuant to Rule 47.5 of the Federal Circuit Rules of Practice, Democracy Worldwide is unaware of another appeal in or from the same civil action or proceeding in the lower court or body that was previously before this Court or another appellate court. In November 2019, the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance, which is part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), published a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), announcing that USAID had $8,000,000 for human rights programming awards to increase protection for human rights defenders in Central Africa. Democracy Worldwide proposed a program to support human rights defenders in Cameroon by strengthening the normative frameworks and institutional architecture that would help Cameroon respect its human rights obligations and by building the capacity of civil society actors to promote those rights, monitor compliance, and demand accountability.

International Student Mobility in Crises: Globalization and Foucault's Rhetoric Question

(1999) understand globalization as "a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions—assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact—generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power” (p. 6). Discussion: "Neoliberal globalization” and student mobility in crises I personally use the term neoliberal globalization in that I critique "neoliberalism as an ideology, political philosophy, economic doctrine and policy model has been embraced by many Western countries and multilateral institutions and embedded in contemporary globalization” (Zheng & Kapoor, 2020, Neoliberal globalization and opening-up section, para. 1) and argue ISM across national borders has been significantly influenced by neoliberal globalization and neoliberalism-doctrined supranational organizations like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which promote the removal of barriers and the liberalization of international trade. [...]ISM can be regarded as a flow because it bears the specific social and educational meaning and has caused some global effects as an increasing number of international students cross borders for education (Zheng, 2010). [...]China's outbound ISM might be affected in that it is confined to many uncertain factors, such as the capacity of foreign higher education institutions, available financial support for Chinese students from the Chinese government, students' family, or foreign higher education institutions, and visa requirement of foreign countries.