Human Trafficking, Sex Tourism, and Child Exploitation on the Southern Border

Human trafficking and various other forms of child sexual exploitation on the United States-Mexico border are described from social science and law enforcement perspectives, including current laws and definitions, case examples, and descriptions of victims and traffickers. The Southern Border Initiative of the AMBER Alert Project is outlined as one effort to combat trafficking through collaboration between law enforcement agencies and programs in the United States and Mexico. Policy recommendations include increasing knowledge and collaboration between law enforcement, social service agencies, and judicial systems across the border region and between the United States and Mexico.

Quality of feedback to e-mail requests - an explorative study in alpine tourism destinations

The central aim of our project is to explore the handling of e-mail request from customers by tourist organisations and to explain the perceived behaviour. For this purpose, we designed a qualitative empirical study which consists basically of two stages. The first stage consists of a black-box test where we employ the setting of a qualitative experiment to measure the behaviour of the organisation to an e-mail request. The second stage comprises a with-box test where we want to look into the tourist organizations and analyse the relevant information processes. This study should give as some insight in the internal processing of e-mail requests and thus should help to explain the reactions that we registered.

The Social Imaginary of Culture/Civilization in the Arabic Literary Tradition

Charles Taylor’s contribution to social imaginaries offers an interpretive framework for better understanding modernity as secularity. One of its main aspects is conceiving of human society in linear, homogenous time (secular time). Looking into the Arabic intellectual tradition, I will argue in my paper that Taylor’s framework can help us understand major social and intellectual transformations. The Ottoman and Arabic modernization process during the 19th century has often been understood by focusing on certain core concepts. One of these is tamaddun, usually translated as “civilization.” I will be mostly talking about the works of two “pioneers” of Arab modernity (which is traditionally referred to as an-nahḍa, the so-called Arab Renaissance): the Syrian Fransīs Marrāsh and the Egyptian Rifāʿa aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī. First I will focus on Marrāsh’s didactic novel “The Forest of Truth” (1865), as it offers a complex view of tamaddun, which has sometimes been construed as merely a social and political reform program. The category of "social imaginary,” however, is useful in grasping the wider semantic scope of this concept, which is reading it as a signifier for human history conceived of in secular time, as Taylor defines it. This conceptualization of human history functioning within the immanent frame can also be observed in the introduction to “The Extraction of Pure Gold in the Description of Paris” (1834), a systematic account of a travel experience in France that was written by the other “pioneer,” aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī. Finally, in translating tamaddun as “the modern social imaginary of civilization/culture,” the talk aims to consider this imaginary as a major factor in the emergence of the “secular age.” Furthermore, it suggests the importance of studying (quasi-) literary texts, such as historiographical, geographical, and self-narratives in the Arabic literary tradition, in order to further elaborate continuities and ruptures in social imaginaries.