Coimbra: cidade amiga das pessoas idosas?!

Introdução: Em Portugal, bem como nos restantes países mundiais, tem sido registado, em virtude de múltiplas transformações societárias, um aumento crescente do envelhecimento demográfico. Este novo cenário demográfico originou uma reflexão, por parte de organizações supranacionais, sobre as cidades na sua relação com os munícipes mais velhos. Desta reflexão surge o projeto Cidade Amiga das Pessoas Idosas que apresenta referenciais de avaliação das cidades para que estas possam adaptar as suas estruturas e serviços aos seus munícipes mais velhos. Beneficiando desta forma do potencial que as pessoas mais velhas representam para a humanidade. Objetivos: O presente estudo tem como objetivo central verificar se a cidade de Coimbra é uma cidade amiga das pessoas idosas. Metodologia: A pesquisa remete para um estudo qualitativo exploratório a partir dos procedimentos metodológicos que constam do Protocolo de Vancouver. O focus group decorreu em duas sessões. Participantes: Foram auscultados 16 pessoas, 15 (93,8%) do sexo feminino. A idade média situa-se nos 79,88 anos (dp= ± 10,658), são maioritariamente viúvos (7= 43,8 %) e 7 (43,8%) e têm como habilitações a 4ª classe. Autoclassificam-se maioritariamente na classe média baixa (7 =43,8). Resultados: Das oito categorias analisadas três categorias “espaços exteriores e edifícios”, “transportes” e “respeito e inclusão social” são avaliadas com aspetos positivos e negativos. O “suporte comunitário e serviços de saúde” é avaliado como positivo enquanto a “habitação”, “participação social” e “comunicação e informação” são avaliados como negativos. As sugestões efetuadas referem-se a um único tópico “espaços exteriores e edifícios”. Conclusões: Se partilharmos a tese que uma cidade amiga das pessoas idosas estimula o envelhecimento ativo porque otimiza as oportunidades de participação no ambiente urbano melhorando, desta forma, a qualidade de vida das pessoas envelhecem. Os resultados que obtivemos, a partir da auscultação de um grupo de idosos, permitem-nos afirmar que Coimbra precisa de se adaptar aos seus munícipes mais velhos. Só assim Coimbra se poderá tornar uma cidade amiga das pessoas idosas. Importa igualmente registar que os resultados encontrados devem ser mediados pelo perfil sociodemográfico dos idosos entrevistados. / Introduction: In Portugal, as well as in other countries worldwide, has been registered by virtue of multiple associated transformations, an increasing growing of population. This new demographic scenario triggered, led to a reflection on the part of supranational organizations, about the cities in their relationship with the older residents. This reflection comes with the project Friendly City of Older Persons that presents benchmarks for the evaluation of cities so that they can adapt their structures and services to its older citizens. Enjoying this way the potential that older people represent for humanity. Objectives: This study aims to check if the city of Coimbra is an elderly friendly city. Methodology: The research refers to an exploratory qualitative study from the methodological procedures of the Vancouver Protocol. The focus group was held in two sessions. Participants: 16 people were sounded out, 15(93.8%) were female. The average ages tends at79.88 years (dp = ±10,658), are mostly widowers (7=43.8%) and 7 (43.8%) have the qualifications to4th grade. They are classified mostly in the lower middle class(7=43.8). Results: Of the eight analyzed categories three categories" outdoor spaces and buildings", "transport" and "respect and social inclusion" are evaluated on positive and negative aspects. The "community support and health services" is evaluated as positive as the"housing", "social participation "and "communication and information" are evaluated as negative. The suggestions are related to a single topic "buildings and outdoor areas." Conclusions: If we share the view that an elderly friendly citizen courages active aging because it optimizes the opportunities for participation in the urban environment improving, in this manner, the quality of life of the elderly. The results we obtained from the consultation of a group of elderly allow us to say that Coimbra needs to adapt to its older citizens. Only then Coimbra can become a friendly city of the elderly. It should also be noted that the results should be mediated by socio-demographic profile of elderly respondents.

Innovation in the Local Context – A Case Study of BYD in China

In this paper we have used the case of BYD to examine firm innovation in the China context. From a historical perspective, with its strategic diversification from battery to mobile phone manufacturing to automobile manufacturing, we find that BYD has been innovative in its production method, vertical integration strategy, and design of product for local customers. The effective understanding and leveraging of local contextual factors including supply of labor (especially low cost-highly skilled labor), growing middle class, and local industry environments have played important roles for BYD’s innovation in China.

We’re just like everyone else!’ Rethinking the cultural politics of the London Asian urban music scene

This article engages with the practices of politics and its presence and meanings within the Asian scene. Despite work that has taken youth cultures beyond the framework of ‘resistance’ youth cultures are often still imagined and understood through the lens of ‘resistance’. Yet, within the Asian scene, the tensions, disavowal and ambivalence towards politics points toward a more complex, multilayered understanding of contemporary youth cultural forms. This article takes into account the politics of location and of belonging that Asians within this scene are negotiating that are shaping the kind of political outlooks and attitudes that are being voiced. The growth of a middle-class 'desi' community in the UK and the rise of neoliberalism has led to a significant decline in the practice of a radical, deliberative politics within this 'desi' scene.

Shakespeare and the Colonial Encounter in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-03

Transformative Political Spaces? Asambleas Populares, Identity, Alliances and Belonging in Buenos Aires

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Negotiating Community and Nation in Chợ Lớn: Nation-building, Community-building and Transnationalism in Everyday Life during the Republic of Việt Nam, 1955-1975

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Investigating Social Mobility: Cultural Frames and Cultural Frame Switching in First-Generation College Students

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Micro-Foundations of Financialization. Status Anxiety and the Market for Consumer Credit in Chile

This project investigates why people in Chile acquired so much consumer debt in contexts of material prosperity, and asks what the role of inequality and commodification is in this process. The case raises an important challenge to the literature. Insofar as existing accounts assume that the financialization of consumption occurs in contexts marked by wage stagnation and a general deterioration of the middle classes, they engender two contradictory explanations: while political economists argue that people use credit in order to smooth their consumption in the face of market volatility, economists maintain that concentration of wealth at the top pushes middle income consumers to emulate the expenditures of the rich and consume beyond their means. These explanations do not necessarily fit the reality of developing countries. Triangulating in-depth interviews with middle class families, multivariate statistical analysis and secondary literature, the project shows that consumers in Chile use credit to finance “ordinary” forms of consumption that do not aim either at coping with market instability or emulating and signaling status to others. Rather, Chileans use department store credit cards in order to acquire a standard package of “inconspicuous” goods that they feel entitled to have. From this point of view, the systematic indebtedness of consumers originates in a major concern with “rank”, “achievement” and "security" that – following De Botton -- I call “status anxiety”. Status anxiety does not stem from the desire to emulate rich consumers, but from the impossibility of complying with normative expectations about what a middle class family should be (and have) that outweigh wage improvements. The project thus investigates the way in which “status anxiety” is systematically reproduced by means of two broad mechanisms that prompt people to acquire consumer debt. The first mechanism generating debt stems from an increase of real wages and high levels of inequality. It is explained by a general sociological principle known as relative deprivation, which points to the fact that general satisfaction with one´s income, possessions or status, is assessed not in absolute terms such as total income, but in relation with reference groups. In this sense, I explore the mechanisms that operate as catalyzers of relative deprivation, by making explicit social inequalities and distorting the perception of others´ wealth. Despite upward mobility and economic improvement, Chileans share the perception of “falling behind,” which materializes in an “imaginary middle class” against which people compare their status, possessions and economic independence. Finally, I show that the commodification of education, health and pension funds does not directly prompt people to acquire consumer debt, but operate as “income draining” mechanisms that demand higher shares of middle class families’ “discretionary income.” In combination with “relative deprivation,” these “income draining” mechanisms leave families with few options to perform their desired class identities, other than learning how to bring resources from the future into the present with the help of department store credit cards.

Crime and Punishment.

The study of Victorian crime and punishment is a rich area of research that has attracted the interest not only of literary scholars but also of social historians, legal historians, and criminologists. Related scholarship therefore often situates itself at the intersection of traditional disciplinary boundaries, facilitating interdisciplinary conversation. Crime and punishment was a pressing issue for the Victorians and provoked a wealth of responses from contemporaneous commentators in literature, culture, and science. As a new phase of industrialization brought immense wealth for some and abject poverty for others, Victorian urban centers in particular were afflicted by crime. Without an effective system of social welfare in place, social inequality and deprivation drove women, men, and children into petty crime and more serious offenses, resulting in severe punishment ranging from incarceration via penal transportation to hanging. Public executions, not abolished until 1868, attracted huge crowds of spectators, including authors such as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, who wrote about these experiences. A forerunner of the popular press, street literature conveyed and illustrated these events for a broad audience. Execution broadsides of famous cases, printing the alleged last lamentations of convicts on the scaffold in verse, are estimated to have sold by the million. As the legal system was undergoing reform (comprising changes in legal evidence procedure, divorce law, women’s property rights, and punishment for sexual offenses, for example), sensational trials caused furor and stimulated commentary in literature and the media. Crime and punishment was discussed in a range of literary and popular genres, poetry, and reformist writing. The “Newgate School” of fiction was accused of glamorizing crime, and the popular penny dreadfuls were feared to corrupt public morals. Sensational fiction in the 1860s, which often drew on real-life criminal cases and newspaper reports, depicted the supposedly respectable middle-class family home as a center of transgression. Similarly, detective fiction typically focused on crime in the world of the middle classes. For the student new to the subject of crime and punishment, this area’s interdisciplinary nature can pose an initial challenge.

Arquitetura da (in)segurança: estudando relações entre configuração espacial, artifícios de segurança e violência urbana no bairro Manaíra, João Pessoa, Paraíba

João Pessoa, the capital city of the state of Paraíba (Northeast Brazil), is reputed throughout the country as a quiet place, although it has been acquiring, over the past years, an urban character with social implications similar to those of major metropolitan Brazilian areas. The new situation is evident by the social inequalities, with the creation of confined spaces, which segregate and cause enclosure of the inhabitants, leading to death the public space. This study correlates accessibility in spatial structure with two types of crime data, burglary and robbery, recorded in 2008 and 2009, by the Secretaria de Segurança da Paraíba (The government agency public in charge of safety), in the district of Manaíra, an upper middle class neighborhood, which has, in recent times, been considered one of the most violent areas in João Pessoa. Sought to understand connections between these events and morpho-social aspects of the built environment, where examined the spatial properties, such as accessibility of the urban net, the presence of control measures, the safety of buildings and their uses. Spatial properties were also validated by the observation of pedestrian flows at strategic points of the study area. It was concluded that the presence of intense flows helps to attract potential thieves, physical security and control offers little protection

Formación profesional y desigualdad de oportunidades educativas por clase

Tras un repaso a las reflexiones sociológicas sobre la FP y su relación con el origen socioeconómico y el género, así como su plasmación en los debates de política educativa en España, mostramos las tasas de estudiantes o graduados de FP a los 19 y 20 años según clase social de origen y género, desde los nacidos en 1957 hasta 1992. Durante todo este periodo, la desigualdad de oportunidades sociales en el acceso a la FP ha permanecido más bien constante por clase social mientras que ha disminuido por género a partir de las personas nacidas en 1961, pero en mayor medida en las nacidas después de 1970. Los datos muestran que la reforma introducida por la LOGSE, que endureció los requisitos académicos para cursar FP, disminuyó la probabilidad de cursar FP en todas las clases sociales, y que es posible que haya perjudicado en mayor medida a la clase obrera que al resto de clases. Por otro lado, las mujeres cuya familia social de origen pertenece a las clases intermedias optan en menor medida por los estudios de FP que lo que cabría esperar por su género y por su clase social.

Consumerism in urban Russia in the 1880s and 90s: Exploring conceptions of time, space, and modernity through bicycle and watch advertisements

This paper discusses the urban consumer culture in Moscow and Petersburg during the 1880s and 1890s and uses the consumption of bicycles and watches as a lens through which to explore changing perceptions of time and space within the experience of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I argue that the way in which consumers and merchants constructed a dialogue of meaning around particular objects; the way in which objects are consumed by a culture gives insight into the values, morals, and tenure of that culture. The paper preferences newspaper ads and photographs as the mouthpieces of merchants and consumers respectively as they constructed a dialogue in the language of consumerism, and explores the ways in which both parties sought to assign meaning to objects during the experience of modernity. I am particularly interested in the way consumers perform elements of cultural modernity in photographs and how these instances of performance relate to their negotiation of modernity. The paper takes as its focus large section of the urban Russian population, much of whom can traditionally be called “middle class” but whose diversity has led me to the adoption of the term “consumer community,” and whose makeup is described in detail. The paper contributes to the continuing scholarly discourse on the makeup of the middle class in Russia and the social boundaries of late tsarist society. It speaks to the the developing sensibilities and values of a generation struggling to define itself in a rapidly changing world, to the ways in which conceptualizations of public and private space, as well as feminine and masculine space were redefined, and to the developing visual culture of the Russian consumer society, largely predicated on the display of objects to signify socially desirable traits. Whereas other explorations of consumer culture and advertisements have portrayed the relationship between merchants and consumers as a one-sided monologue in which merchants convince consumers that certain objects have cultural value, I emphasis the dialogue between merchants and consumers, and their mutual negotiation of cultural meaning through objects.

Análise do crescimento econômico no Rio Grande do Sul através da aplicação de cadeias de Markov

O estudo do crescimento econômico é de suma importância para que possamos averiguar a trajetória de uma economia ao longo do tempo, a proposta desse trabalho é analisar o crescimento econômico no estado do Rio Grande do Sul, através do instrumental das cadeias de Markov, a ideia principal do estudo está na hipótese de convergência de renda. Primeiramente será testado a hipótese de convergência de renda do estado por meio das microrregiões, para isso serão utilizados dados de produto per capita dos anos de 1990, 2000 e 2010. Também será testado a hipótese de convergência para os municípios do Conselho Regional de Desenvolvimento Sul, situado no Rio Grande do Sul, utilizando dados de renda per capita dos anos de 1991, 2000 e 2010. Os resultados obtidos para as microrregiões do Rio Grande do Sul mostram que as economias não estão convergindo em sua totalidade para uma classe de renda especifica, porém é percebido que no longo prazo haverá uma maior concentração das microrregiões nos extratos de renda próximos a média, o tempo esperado para que as economias cheguem ao seu estado estacionário é de seis períodos. Por meio dos resultados obtidos para a região do Corede Sul, temos que as economias convergirão em sua maioria para a classe de renda médio pobre, seguido pela classe dos médios ricos. Ambas as classes estão situadas próximas a média regional, sendo que as classes de renda pobre e rico situadas aos extremos serão extintas no longo prazo. O tempo esperado para que as economias cheguem ao estado estacionário é de onze períodos.

Análise do crescimento econômico no Rio Grande do Sul através da aplicação de cadeias de markov

O estudo do crescimento econômico é de suma importância para que possamos averiguar a trajetória de uma economia ao longo do tempo, a proposta desse trabalho é analisar o crescimento econômico no estado do Rio Grande do Sul, através do instrumental das cadeias de Markov, a ideia principal do estudo está na hipótese de convergência de renda. Primeiramente será testado a hipótese de convergência de renda do estado por meio das microrregiões, para isso serão utilizados dados de produto per capita dos anos de 1990, 2000 e 2010. Também será testado a hipótese de convergência para os municípios do Conselho Regional de Desenvolvimento Sul, situado no Rio Grande do Sul, utilizando dados de renda per capita dos anos de 1991, 2000 e 2010. Os resultados obtidos para as microrregiões do Rio Grande do Sul mostram que as economias não estão convergindo em sua totalidade para uma classe de renda especifica, porém é percebido que no longo prazo haverá uma maior concentração das microrregiões nos extratos de renda próximos a média, o tempo esperado para que as economias cheguem ao seu estado estacionário é de seis períodos. Por meio dos resultados obtidos para a região do Corede Sul, temos que as economias convergirão em sua maioria para a classe de renda médio pobre, seguido pela classe dos médio ricos. Ambas as classes estão situadas próximas a média regional, sendo que as classes de renda pobre e rico situadas aos extremos serão extintas no longo prazo. O tempo esperado para que as economias cheguem ao estado estacionário é de onze períodos.

Heritage Language Maintenance and Biliteracy Development for Immigrants' Children: A Study of Chinese Immigrants' Family Language Policy and Biliteracy Practices

This study reports on research that examines the family language policy (FLP) and biliteracy practices of middle-class Chinese immigrant families in a metropolitan area in the southwest of the U.S. by exploring language practices pattern among family members, language and literacy environment at home, parents’ language management, parents’ language attitudes and ideologies, and biliteracy practices. In this study, I employed mixed methods, including survey and interviews, to investigate Chinese immigrant parents’ FLP, biliteracy practices, their life stories, and their experience of raising and nurturing children in an English-dominant society. Survey questionnaires were distributed to 55 Chinese immigrant parents and interviews were conducted with five families, including mothers and children. One finding from this study is that the language practices pattern at home shows the trend of language shift among the Chinese immigrants’ children. Children prefer speaking English with parents, siblings, and peers, and home literacy environment for children manifests an English-dominant trend. Chinese immigrant parents’ language attitudes and ideologies are largely influenced by English-only ideology. The priority for learning English surpasses the importance of Chinese learning, which is demonstrated by the English-dominant home literacy practices and an English-dominant language policy. Parents invest more in English literacy activities and materials for children, and very few parents implement Chinese-only policy for their children. A second finding from this study is that a multitude of factors from different sources shape and influence Chinese immigrants’ FLP and biliteracy practices. The factors consist of family-related factors, social factors, linguistic factors, and individual factors. A third finding from this study is that a wide variety of strategies are adopted by Chinese immigrant families, which have raised quite balanced bilingual children, to help children maintain Chinese heritage language (HL) and develop both English and Chinese literacy. The close examination and comparison of different families with English monolingual children, with children who have limited knowledge of HL, and with quite balanced bilingual children, this study discovers that immigrant parents, especially mothers, play a fundamental and irreplaceable role in their children’s HL maintenance and biliteracy development and it recommends to immigrant parents in how to implement the findings of this study to nurture their children to become bilingual and biliterate. Due to the limited number and restricted area and group of participant sampling, the results of this study may not be generalized to other groups in different contexts.