Living with Disasters: Perspectives on the (Re-)Production of Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Swee ◽  
Zuzana Hrdličková

Although communities around the world have been experiencing destructive events leading to loss of life and material destruction for centuries, the past hundred years have been marked by an especially heightened global interest in disasters. This development can be attributed to the rising impact of disasters on communities throughout the twentieth century and the consequent increase in awareness among the general public. Today, international and local agencies, scientists, politicians, and other actors including nongovernmental organizations across the world are working toward untangling and tackling the various chains of causality surrounding disasters. Numerous research and practitioners’ initiatives are taking place to inform and improve preparedness and response mechanisms. Recently, it has been acknowledged that more needs to be learned about the social and cultural aspects of disasters in order for these efforts to be successful (IFRC 2014).

Author(s):  
Turaev Bakhodir Hatamovich ◽  
Saidov Abdullo Shukhratovich

Over the past decades, tourism has become an important sector of the economy. The importance of tourism is important not only for the economy, but also for human development in the social and cultural aspects. The active tourism sector is considered to be youth. According to the World Tourism Organization, the number of tourists among young people is growing among tourists around the world. The UNWTO predicts that by 2020 there will be nearly 370 million international youth trips per year. The tourism industry in Uzbekistan has significant development potential. Uzbekistan has a very large tourism and recreational potential. On the territory of the country there are more than 7400 monuments of architecture and art of different eras and civilizations, many of which are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. This article describes the measures taken to develop the tourism industry in Uzbekistan over the past 3 years, as well as gives tips on the development of youth tourism in Uzbekistan.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 149-167
Author(s):  
Michał Pawleta

This paper aims to conceptualize the social role of archaeology and archeological heritage in the present. First, it contextualizes the legal and doctrinal background of activities aimed at dissemination of cultural and archaeological heritage and engagement of public in initiatives around that heritage. Next, it describes main forms of outreach activities undertaken by archaeologists in Poland. Further, it presents community-oriented activities and initiatives that go beyond education of the general public about the past and archaeology and strive for engaging local communities in activities centered around archaeology and archaeological heritage. It concludes with a statement that openness of archaeology to society helps to strengthen its current social position, determines its role in the world and attributes social activities of archaeologists with a deeper meaning.


Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.


Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.


1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-494
Author(s):  
Arieh Loya

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.


Author(s):  
Peter T. Daniels

It seems to me that the study of writing is about where the study of language was before the development of linguistics over the past century-and-a-bit. Everyone we know knows how to write, and therefore everyone we know thinks they know about writing. This paper looks at how writing has been presented to the general public, and how it has been treated in linguistics since the first real textbook of 1933.


Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-783
Author(s):  
Dragana Frfulanović-Šomođi ◽  
Milena Savić

The design of socialist Yugoslavia received a particularly new look through the creation of Aleksandar Joksimović, which gave the new elements a traditional look, equally putting them in rank with world-famous designs of celebrated designers. This paper was created with the idea of emphasizing the importance of the creativity of Joksimović, which is within the framework of socialist norms, as an artist, remained insufficiently recognized, although his work was in the service of exclusive promotion of the cultural aspects of his country. His concept of design based on the medieval cultural tradition emerged from the framework of the then socialist clothes, and it is called grandiose exoticism. The names of the first collections given by the historical figures of medieval Serbian history are a clear indication that it is possible to draw inspiration from the past, if it is professionally approached and adequately, by contemporary trends, the audience and the market. Joksimovic's individualism, apart from design, was also reflected in the way the collection itself was modeled through models and choreographies, and clearly once again showed his step ahead of time, while the social and political circumstances forced him to stay one step behind.


Politeja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2(65)) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marcol

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document