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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, each of the five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) took notably different approaches to presenting coronavirus-related information on the internet through official websites. To understand these differences, this chapter engages with literature that looks at how states use websites for self-promotion, what shapes the decision-making of those elites in control of a state, and who sanctions the creation of those websites. Pairing a quantitative presentation of these websites' qualities with an analysis of text and images, the differences among these coronavirus websites are sketched out before they are situated in the political circumstances of the states which designed them. This analysis finds that coronavirus websites developed by Central Asian states are not solely depoliticized platforms for disseminating information to the public, but, rather, are inexorably linked to the concerns and objectives of state elites;in turn these elite agendas are reflected in each state's online response to the pandemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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Introduction: covid 19 has had an undeniable impact on various sectors of the economy and the tourism sector, including health tourism. Health tourism has had a significant impact on the prevalence of corona due to its direct relationship with people's health. The purpose of this study is was to identify related factors of health tourism on covid-19. Methods: he current research is a qualitative research and was done with the theme analysis method. Data collection has been done using semi-structured interviews with health tourism experts and health tourists. Targeted sampling continued until theoretical saturation was reached, and a total of 14 samples were selected. Results: The results showed that related factors of health tourism on covid 19 epidemic was in both micro and macro levvels. In the micro domain, three categories of factors, including factors related to health tourism services, factors related to tourism ancillary services, and factors related to health tourists, have been affected by covid 19. In the macro sector, the related factors of health tourism on covid 19 epidemic has been in 4 sectors: economic, technological, political-legal and cultural-social. Conclusion: Based on the results of the research, things like the lack of equipment due to its allocation to the corona sectors, the expansion of online services, and the lack of specialized human resources have affected health tourism. In the factors related to ancillary services, unused capacities have increased and this discussion has led to the closure of some sectors. This issue will reduce the capacity of ancillary services in the post-corona period and will be a threat to the development of health tourism. In the tourist sector, Corona has led to an increase in the general awareness of tourists as well as an increase in health concerns, and price sensitivity has decreased in relation to health issues.
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Many China observers have commented that Beijing is harsh and assertive on diplomatic occasions. By publicizing the nationalistic rhetoric and moves in internal propaganda, the PRC aims to please domestic audiences. This article examines China's practices of 'wolf-warrior diplomacy', explicates the rationale behind it, and provides three plausible explanations. Firstly, the individualist explanation highlights the personal motives of 'wolf-warrior' diplomats. However, wolf-warrior diplomacy is not the common practice of Chinese diplomats, as most Chinese diplomats, unlike these wolf-warriors, remain conservative, taking an orthodox approach to their duties. Secondly, the institutional explanation presents a potential conflict between propaganda and diplomacy agencies in conducting waixuan (external propaganda, overseas-targeted propaganda: (sic)(sic)). I elaborate on how the changing working doctrines of waixuan have encouraged wolf-warrior diplomacy. Finally, the strategic explanation highlights how Beijing diverts the popular attention away from its domestic issues and towards 'external threats' and rallies popular support at home by 'talking tough' and 'blaming others'. The diversionary use of assertive diplomacy also allows Beijing to avoid publicizing its policy failures, buy more time and room for manoeuvre, and plan tactical reforms while preserving its fundamental political system. I also argue that the wolf-warrior diplomacy is more of ad hoc response to perceived geopolitical risk in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic than a well-crafted strategy.
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This workshop explores the role of healing ourselves as a key aspect for transformative social change. It brings together social justice and community based work in HCI that engages with healing and joy to expand on current methodologies such as autoethnography, somaesthetics, and embodied design which aim to describe different ways of knowing and describing and living experiences as inputs for design futuring. Our concern of interest is the ways in which all of us have lived through continuous community grief and loss due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and a continued climate crisis;and the resulting symptoms like anxiety, depression, body pain, and scattered focus. We believe that we must acknowledge these experiences and feelings about these events in order to effectively work towards more optimistic futures. This workshop takes the space and time to consider our recent collective traumas and explore how to integrate them into futures that support the development of futures that fit our emotional, ethical, social and physical needs. Our aim is to build a greater understanding of how the CHI community can integrate healing in support of social change. © 2023 Owner/Author.
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PurposePolitical participation of young people has been examined, but there is a lack of research about how these participation forms are interpreted and what counts as participation for young people. The study aims to identify discourses of political participation in Hungary, where the COVID-19 restrictions during 2020-2021 have confined young people's everyday interactions and political activism to the online space for an extended period. The authors' asteroid-effect hypothesis suggests that new discourses of political participation have become more widespread, which may have reinterpreted the previous dynamics between online and offline participation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyse the results of six focus groups and eight interviews with young people conducted between 2021-2022 through discourse analysis.FindingsThe qualitative results show that to intellectualise the everyday discourses of youth political participation, extending its classical theories is worthwhile. While online participation has not emerged as a paramount, positive interpretational framework, a new discourse of political participation has emerged, making conversation a fundamental act.Originality/valueWhile the results are limited to Hungarian youth, the strong appearance of participation as a communicative action can have consequences to theoretical approaches of political participation. The authors believe that COVID-19 restrictions had a significant role in this change, because family talks became more politicised.
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The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the inequitable response to it has created a space for rethinking the knowledge translation that informs current health policy formulation and planning. Wide recognition of the failure of global health governance and national health systems has led to calls for reviving the Primary Health Care (PHC) agenda for post-COVID health systems development. Despite the joint international declaration on PHC made four decades ago, it has had limited application. This paper argues that the recent attempts to rethink PHC will prove inadequate without analysing and learning from the politics of knowledge (PoK) underlying global health policy and planning. Even with the growing relevance of the spirit of the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978) and its operationalisation as detailed in the report of conference proceedings, reassessment of reasons for its limited implementation continues to be located largely in the political economy of the medical establishment, the international economic order or in national governance flaws. Failure to address the dominant knowledge paradigm in the Alma Ata articulation of PHC has contributed to its limited application. This calls for expansion in the analysis from knowledge translation to generation and hierarchisation of knowledge. The paper discusses how the application of PoK as an analytical lens helps understand the power equations underlying the process of knowledge generation and its translation into policy and practice. Beneath the techno-centric and commodified health system is the dominant ‘knowledge' system whose foundations and assumptions ought to be interrogated. By following a PoK approach, a reorientation of thinking about the relationship between various forms of knowledge and knowledge holders is anticipated. A new health service system design is outlined—translating the spirit of PHC of 1978 into a ‘PHC Version 2.0'—that addresses the PoK gap in operational terms, with an approach to guide all levels of healthcare. It suggests how the world can be empowered to respond better by engaging with diverse ontologies and epistemologies to conceptualise knowledge and frame policies. Further, in the contexts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, it can contribute to the development of self-reliance to democratise general health policy and planning in the post-pandemic period.
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Democracy has increasingly come under pressure as democratic norms are being eroded. This article explores why democratic processes are at risk in Europe and the United States and what might replace them. It reflects the thinking of the Study Group on Democracy convened under the auspices of the International Association for Intelligence Education in 2022. Its deliberations identified a set of underlying key drivers, documented how they manifested, and speculated on what new forms of governance might replace democratic rule. Recent trends cited include the corruption of norms, the disruptive influence of social media, the growing diversity of society, the shift from community-based problem-solving to reliance on identity politics, the emergence of existential threats, and the need for strong leadership. The group concludes that prospects for sustaining democratic institutions can best be understood by viewing future trends along two perspectives: the complexity of society and modes of decision-making.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is the most disastrous health event of the twenty-first century with significant impacts on the economy, institutions, organizations and people's well-being and lifestyle. Risk perception is a knowledge process that manifests itself in risk behavior and reflects people's experiences, beliefs and social influences. The management of risk perception is essential in contributing to people's protective behaviors in the presence of health risks. In Cuba, one of its significant effects is reflected in the psychology of individuals, despite policies to mitigate its consequences. Minimizing COVID-19 transmission requires the application of effective policies that contribute with adequate perceptions, depending on the risk factors. The goal of this research is to develop a system of actions that can contribute to the transition of a favorable scenario for the management of risk perception regarding COVID-19 in Cuba according to the new normality and through the use of a scenario planning methodology. The findings allow characterizing the current scenario and proposing actions and indicators in order to achieve the most favorable scenario for risk perception management related to COVID-19 from a geographic perspective. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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The aim of this study is to put forward a critical analysis about the working of neo-liberal power in which we live with a specific reference to Byung Chul-Han. He claims that Foucault's consideration of bio-politics as a power which focuses on body falls behind to explain the relations of power in the contemporary neo-liberal order and the structure of individual and society. In order to overcome this shortcoming, Chul-Han claims that the power of neo-liberal order is a pschyo-politics which establishes its sovereignty by apply-ing pschyo-politic tools such as Big Data and therefore by influencing the hu-man soul. In this study, it is claimed that bio-politics hasn't gone out of the in-terest of power completely regarding the power practices during the process of Covid-19 pandemic which has continued over two years and that we don't wit-ness a power model in which only pschyo-politics works. In this regard, it is concluded that in the period in which we live, the power has a working which infleunces not only to the body but also to the soul and therefore which we can conceptualize as pschyo-somatics instead of the view of Foucault's bio-politics as Chul-Han understands or Chul-Han's psycho-politics.
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[...]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.
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The chapter analyzes official, religiously affiliated constructions of the pandemic at the beginning of the first COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe and North America. More concretely, it looks at the immediate, official, publicized constructions of the pandemic by members of the so-called ‘Committee of Religious NGOs at the United Nations (CRNGO)' in April 2020. By doing so, the article highlights that the respective constructions of the pandemic by representatives of the CRNGO have been dominated by a sense of broad agreement as well as immediate urgency. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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This research aimed to analyze the use of cybermarketing in the political campaign of Andrés Arauz during the 2021 presidential elections, in contrast to that of Lenín Moreno in 2017, to identify the change in strategies in the COVID-19 pandemic. A quantitative and qualitative methodology was proposed with an exploratory approach that allows the objective to be met. For the design, techniques such as interviews with experts in political communication and surveys of young centennials and millennials between 21 and 29 years old in various provinces of Ecuador were used. It is determined that the youth electorate is vulnerable to cybermarketing and neuromarketing, and that only certain ATL media such as radio and television, as well as other traditional activities, continued to be used in the two campaigns. Young people represent a relevant percentage in the electoral register. Cyberpolitics starts from cyberactivism and Ecuador does not have a political culture, but political marketing is advancing with referents such as Jaime Durán Barba, who has starred in some electoral victories. © 2022, Associacao Iberica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informacao. All rights reserved.
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'Border hotels' have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about 'border hotels', closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of 'border hotels', this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the 'hotel geopolitics' agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.
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The article draws on the concepts of "felt needs” and "politics of listening” widely used in community development and applies them more broadly to the humanitarian crisis suffered by internally displaced persons in Burkina Faso. It investigates the two-way communication stream between radio journalists and listeners drawing on feedback collected remotely from 153 representatives of internally displaced and host communities in Burkina Faso during COVID-19. It argues that while a voice must be given to marginalised communities, it must also be listened to and acted upon. Rather than radio journalism being a loudspeaker for top-down messaging, the study argues that alternative approaches should be adopted in conflict- and pandemic-affected areas. It finds that a balance is needed between the information that listeners feel they need in their new extreme circumstances and the information that radio journalists, drawing on their expertise, feel would be strategically empowering. © 2023 The Author(s). Co-published by Unisa Press and Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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Public policy choices continue to bring dramatic changes to migration practices in the era of the coronavirus in the United States. In this article, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic facilitated the creation and maintenance of states of exception while continuing to destabilize practices at the Mexico–U.S. border through the politics of fear. Specifically, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), Zero Tolerance Policy (ZTP), COVID-19 CAPIO, Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACA), and Title 42 used an arcane section of U.S. law to immediately expel asylum seekers and refugees. We show that these policies highlight the formation and maintenance of states of exception consistent with the work of Agamben. We further discuss how the politics of fear can reinforce hegemonic narratives targeting asylum seekers while shaping political agendas that lean toward a specific brand of nationalism using public health as a context. The U.S. government under the Trump administration—and the Biden administration to a lesser, yet continuous, extent—constructed these policies aimed primarily at refugees and asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico thereby violating laws and international treaty obligations. Related Articles: Duman, Yoav H. 2014. "Reducing the Fog? Immigrant Regularization and the State.” Politics & Policy 42(2): 187–220. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12065. Garrett, Terence Michael. 2020. "The Security Apparatus, Federal Magistrate Courts, and Detention Centers as Simulacra: The Effects of Trump's Zero Tolerance Policy on Migrants and Refugees in the Rio Grande Valley.” Politics & Policy 48(2): 372–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12348. Maggio, James. 2007. "The Presidential Rhetoric of Terror: The (Re)Creation of Reality Immediately after 9/11.” Politics & Policy 35(4): 819–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2007.00085.x. © 2023 Policy Studies Organization.
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Prior studies have documented the pattern of decreased state funding for higher education in periods of economic contraction (i.e., the balance wheel phenomenon). This qualitative case study examines how policymakers in California and Texas made decisions about funding higher education at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when policymakers faced an economic downturn. Data comprise 28 interviews with key state actors and 69 documents. The analysis expands prior understandings of how state policymakers make budgeting decisions that affect higher education by exploring how they perceive certain target populations as deserving or undeserving of state support. The study also sheds light on the tenuous relationship between policymakers' views of higher education and their funding decisions. © 2023 The Author(s).
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This article critically analyzes the human rights perspective upon what has emerged as one of the most significant socioeconomic and political challenges confronting many millions of people residing within high-income, liberal-democratic societies: rising poverty and socioeconomic inequality. This article argues that international and domestic human rights law and the social and political imaginaries of the wider human rights community largely fail to adequately diagnose and effectively respond to poverty and inequality within high-income, liberal-democratic societies. As a political and ethical doctrine founded upon a normative commitment to social justice, human rights should be taking the lead in efforts to condemn, understand, and develop responses to the poverty and inequality which blight the lives of many millions of people within many of the world's most affluent and, allegedly, most "liberal” societies. Human rights law has historically not done so. We, as a community, have not done so. This article offers a specific explanation for this continuing failure, by focusing upon the absence of any concerted recognition of or engagement with social class as it contributes to and compounds our exposure to poverty and inequality. Human rights remain largely blind to the many ways in which social class is intricately connected to poverty and inequality. The human rights community within high-income, liberal-democratic societies characteristically fails to take class seriously. Building upon previous writing in this area, this article explains why class is rarely recognized or engaged with by the human rights community. This article also sets out the basis for how we might begin the task of overcoming this highly damaging class blindness, to set the stage for what the author asserts as an urgent need if human rights is to provide the kind of political and ethical leadership required to effectively engage with poverty and inequality in affluent societies: the degentrification of human rights.
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The COVID pandemic has exposed several faultlines of urbanism in India. This paper is a narrative of the remarkable continuities between the past legacies of governance of informal settlements, pandemic response and emerging ideas of alternate urbanisms and their inability to address issues of inequity, exclusion and vulnerability. The pandemic and the resultant situation exposes the limits of the current policies, programming linked to informal settlements, their imagination of informality and outlines the urgent need to escape the trap of bracketing of informal settlements as an 'issue' within itself delinked from the dynamic and ever-changing processes of urbanization through community led policy responses and effective local governance. In the absence of effective state response, informal settlements authored their own script of coping with the challenges thrown by the pandemic; their presence, participation and centrality in scripting future policies is a much-needed transformation of the narrative.