874 resultados para The Cold war in Central America


Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

The discussions about social justice date from ancient times, but despite the enduring interest in the topic and the progress made, we are still witnessing injustices throughout the world. Thus, the search for social justice, under some form, is an inseparable part of our lives. In general, social justice may be considered as a critical idea that challenges us to reform our institutions and practices in the name of greater fairness (Miller 1999, p. x). In political and policy debates, social justice is often related to fair access (Brown, 2013) but at the same time its meanings seem to vary when we consider different definitions, perspectives and social theories (Zajda, Majhanovich, & Rust, 2006). When seen in the context of higher education, social justice appears in relevant literature as a buzzword (Patton, Shahjahan, Riyad, & Osei-Kofi, 2010). Within the recent studies of higher education and public debates related to the development of higher education, more emphasis is placed on the link between higher education and the economic growth and how higher education could be more responsive to the labour market demands, and little emphasis has been put on social justice. Given this, the present study attempts to at least partially fill the gap with regard to this apparently very topical issue, especially in the context of the unprecedented worldwide expansion of higher education in the last century (Schofer & Meyer, 2005), an expansion that is expected to continue in the next decades. More specifically, the expansion of higher education intensified in the second part of the 20th century, especially after World War II. It was seen as a result of the intertwined dynamics related to demographic, economic and political pressures (Goastellec, 2008a). This trend undoubtedly contributed to the increase of the size of the student body. To illustrate this trend, we may point out that in the period between 2000 and 2007, the number of tertiary students in the world increased from 98,303,539 to 150,656,459 (UNESCO, 2009, p. 205). This growth occurred in all regions of the world, including Central and Eastern Europe, North America and Western Europe, and contributed to raising the number of tertiary graduates. Thus, in the period between 2000 and 2008, the total number of tertiary graduates in the European Union (EU) 27 increased by a total of 35 percent (or 4.5 percent per year). However, this growth was very uneven, ranging from 21.1 percent in Romania to 0.7 percent in Hungary (European Commission working staff document, 2011). The increase of the number of students and graduates was seen as enhancing the social justice in higher education, since it is assumed that expansion “extends a valued good to a broader spectrum of the population” (Arum, Gamoran, & Shavit, 2007, p. 29). However, concerns for a deep contradiction for 21st-century higher education also emerged with regard to its expansion.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

Relief shown by hachures.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

“Knowing the Enemy: Nazi Foreign Intelligence in War, Holocaust and Postwar,” reveals the importance of ideologically-driven foreign intelligence reporting in the wartime radicalization of the Nazi dictatorship, and the continued prominence of Nazi discourses in postwar reports from German intelligence officers working with the U.S. Army and West German Federal Intelligence Service after 1945. For this project, I conducted extensive archival research in Germany and the United States, particularly in overlooked and files pertaining to the wartime activities of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Abwehr, Fremde Heere Ost, Auswärtiges Amt, and German General Staff, and the recently declassified intelligence files pertaining to the postwar activities of the Gehlen Organization, Bundesnachrichtendienst, and Foreign Military Studies Program. Applying the technique of close textual analysis to the underutilized intelligence reports themselves, I discovered that wartime German intelligence officials in military, civil service, and Party institutions all lent the appearance of professional objectivity to the racist and conspiratorial foreign policy beliefs held in the highest echelons of the Nazi dictatorship. The German foreign intelligence services’ often erroneous reporting on Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and international Jewry simultaneously figured in the radicalization of the regime’s military and anti-Jewish policies and served to confirm the ideological preconceptions of Hitler and his most loyal followers. After 1945, many of these same figures found employment with the Cold War West, using their “expertise” in Soviet affairs to advise the West German Government, U.S. Military, and CIA on Russian military and political matters. I chart considerable continuities in personnel and ideas from the wartime intelligence organizations into postwar West German and American intelligence institutions, as later reporting on the Soviet Union continued to reproduce the flawed wartime tropes of innate Russian military and racial inferiority.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

The purpose of this dissertation is to study literary representations of Eastern Europe in the works of celebrated and less-known American authors, who visited and narrated the region between the mid-1960s and early 2000s. The main critical body focuses on Eastern Europe before 1989 and encompasses three major voices of American literature: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Roth. However, in the last chapter I also explore American literary perceptions of the area following the collapse of communism. Importantly, the term “Eastern Europe” as used in this dissertation is charged with significance. I approach it not only as a space on the map or the geopolitical construct which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, but rather as a conceptual category and a repository of meanings built out of fact and fantasy: specific historical, political and cultural realities interlaced with subjective worldviews, preconceptions, and mental images. The critical framework of this dissertation is twofold. I reach for the concept of liminality to elucidate the indeterminacy and malleability which lies at the heart of the object of study—the idea, image, and experience of Eastern Europe. Bearing in mind the nature of the works under analysis, all of which were inspired by actual visits behind the Iron Curtain, I propose to interpret these transatlantic literary journeys in terms of generative experience, where Eastern Europe is mapped as a liminal space of possibility; a contact zone between cultures and, potentially, the locus of self-discovery and individual transformation. If liminality is the metaphor or a lens that I employ in order to account for the nature of the analyzed works and the complex terrain they map, imagology, whose purpose is to study the processes of constructing selfhood and otherness in literature, provides me with the method and the critical vocabulary for analyzing selected literary representations. The dissertation is divided into six chapters, the last of which serves as coda to the previous discussion. The first two chapters constitute the critical foundation of this work. Then, in chapters 3, 4, and 5 I study American images of Eastern Europe in the works written by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Roth, respectively. The last, sixth chapter of this dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first one, I discuss new critical perspectives and avenues of research in the study of Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism. Then, I carry out a joint analysis of four works written after 1989 by Eva Hoffman, Arthur Phillips, John Beckman, and Gary Shteyngart. The dissertation ends with conclusions in which I summarize my findings and reflections, and suggest implications for future research. As this dissertation seeks to demonstrate, Eastern Europe portrayed in the analyzed works oscillates between contradictory representations which are contingent upon a number of factors, most importantly who maps it and in what context. Even though each experience of Eastern Europe is distinct and fueled by the profiles, identities, and interests of the characters and their creators, I have found out that certain patterns of othering are present in all the works. Thus, my research seems to suggest that there is something of a recurrent literary image of Eastern Europe, which goes beyond the context of the Cold War. Accordingly, while this dissertation hopes to be a valid contribution to the study of literary and cultural mappings of Eastern Europe, it also generates new questions regarding the current, post-communist representation of the area and its relationship to the national tropes explored in my work.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

There is clearly contention over the shape and formation of science curriculum and over, ultimately, what will count as scientific knowledge, skill, capacity and world view. The Cold War set the policy context for an ongoing focus on science education across Western nations. Sputnik-era US and UK educational policy offered a broad premise for the purpose of school science: in a risky geopolitical environment, high levels of advanced scientific expertise were central to the national interest and necessary for the maintenance of military/industrial and technological power. Half a century on, in the context of global economic and environmental crisis, as a justification for digital, industrial and biomedical innovation, the rationale for the production of scientific capital is central to curriculum settlements and educational policy in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

Air transportation of Australian casualties in World War II was initially carried out in air ambulances with an accompanying male medical orderly. By late 1943 with the war effort concentrated in the Pacific, Allied military authorities realised that air transport was needed to move the increasing numbers of casualties over longer distances. The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) became responsible for air evacuation of Australian casualties and established a formal medical air evacuation system with trained flight teams early in 1944. Specialised Medical Air Evacuation Transport Units (MAETUs) were established whose sole responsibility was undertaking air evacuations of Australian casualties from the forward operational areas back to definitive medical care. Flight teams consisting of a RAAF nursing sister (registered nurse) and a medical orderly carried out the escort duties. These personnel had been specially trained in Australia for their role. Post-WWII, the RAAF Nursing Service was demobilised with a limited number of nurses being retained for the Interim Air Force. Subsequently, those nurses were offered commissions in the Permanent Air Force. Some of the nurses who remained were air evacuation trained and carried out air evacuations both in Australia and as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Australia became responsible for the air evacuation of British Commonwealth casualties from Korea to Japan. With a re-organisation of the Australian forces as part of the British Commonwealth forces, RAAF nurses were posted to undertake air evacuation from Korea and back to Australia from Iwakuni, Japan. By 1952, a specialised casualty staging section was established in Seoul and staffed by RAAF nurses from Iwakuni on a rotation basis. The development of the Australian air evacuation system and the role of the flight nurses are not well documented for the period 1943-1953. The aims of this research are three fold and include documenting the origins and development of the air evacuation system from 1943-1953; analysing and documenting the RAAF nurse’s role and exploring whether any influences or lessons remain valid today. A traditional historical methodology of narrative and then analysis was used to inform the flight nurse’s role within the totality of the social system. Evidence was based on primary data sources mainly held in Defence files, the Australian War Memorial or the National Archives of Australia. Interviews with 12 ex-RAAF nurses from both WWII and the Korean War were conducted to provide information where there were gaps in the primary data and to enable exploration of the flight nurses’ role and their contributions in war of the air evacuation of casualties. Finally, this thesis highlights two lessons that remain valid today. The first is that interoperability of air evacuation systems with other nations is a force multiplier when resources are scarce or limited. Second, the pre-flight assessment of patients was essential and ensured that there were no deaths in-flight.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

Recommender systems are widely used online to help users find other products, items etc that they may be interested in based on what is known about that user in their profile. Often however user profiles may be short on information and thus it is difficult for a recommender system to make quality recommendations. This problem is known as the cold-start problem. Here we investigate using association rules as a source of information to expand a user profile and thus avoid this problem. Our experiments show that it is possible to use association rules to noticeably improve the performance of a recommender system under the cold-start situation. Furthermore, we also show that the improvement in performance obtained can be achieved while using non-redundant rule sets. This shows that non-redundant rules do not cause a loss of information and are just as informative as a set of association rules that contain redundancy.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

The aim of this thesis has been to map the ethical journey of experienced nurses now practising in rural and remote hospitals in central and south-west Queensland and in domiciliary services in Brisbane. One group of the experienced nurses in the study were Directors of Nursing in rural and remote hospitals. These nurses were “hands on”, “multi-skilled “ nurses who also had the task of managing the hospital. Also there were two Directors of Nursing from domiciliary services in Brisbane. A grounded theory method was used. The nurses were interviewed and the data retrieved from the interviews was coded, categorised and from these categories a conceptual framework was generated. The literature which dealt with the subject of ethical decision making and nurses also became part of the data. The study revealed that all these nurses experienced moral distress as they made ethical decisions. The decision making categories revealed in the data were: the area of financial management; issues as end of life approaches; allowing to die with dignity; emergency decisions; experience of unexpected death; the dilemma of providing care in very difficult circumstances. These categories were divided into two chapters: the category related to administrative and financial constraints and categories dealing with ethical issues in clinical settings. A further chapter discussed the overarching category of coping with moral distress. These experienced nurses suffered moral distress as they made ethical decisions, confirming many instances of moral distress in ethical decision making documented in the literature to date. Significantly, the nurses in their interviews never mentioned the ethical principles used in bioethics as an influence in their decision making. Only one referred to lectures on ethics as being an influence in her thinking. As they described their ethical problems and how they worked through them, they drew on their own previous experience rather than any knowledge of ethics gained from nursing education. They were concerned for their patients, they spoke from a caring responsibility towards their patients, but they were also concerned for justice for their patients. This study demonstrates that these nurses operated from the ethic of care, tempered with the ethic of responsibility as well as a concern for justice for their patients. Reflection on professional experience, rather than formal ethics education and training, was the primary influence on their ethical decision making.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

It is a common acceptance that contemporary schoolchildren live in a world that is intensely visual and commercially motivated, where what is imagined and what is experienced intermingle. Because of this, contemporary education should encourage a child to make reference to, and connection with their ‘out-of-school’ life. The core critical underpinnings of curriculum based arts appreciation and theory hinge on educators and students taking a historical look at the ways artists have engaged with, and made comment upon, their contemporary societies. My article uses this premise to argue for the need to persist with pushing for critique of/through the visual, that it be delivered as an active process via the arts classroom rather than as visual literacy, here regarded as a more passive process for interpreting and understanding visual material. The article asserts that visual arts lessons are best placed to provide fully students with such critique because they help students to develop a ’critical eye’, an interpretive lens often used by artists to view, analyse and independently navigate and respond to contemporary society.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

This study contributes to the literature on international retailing by addressing a gap in the literature as to how retailers from emerging markets expand internationally. This historical case study analyzes the growth and internationalization process of Chilean retailer Falabella, one of the largest in Latin America and has been able to compete with multinationals from developed countries. The research is based upon primary and secondary data sources including 33 oral interviews with company managers and family executives, as well as industry data, corporate reports, and trade journals. Drawing on institutional theory, the findings show that by belonging to a family conglomerate, engaging in networks and partnerships, organizational learning, and having an experienced management team helped Falabella gain legitimacy in all international markets.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

This paper focuses on the satirical Australian television show The Chaser’s War on Everything, and uses it to critically explore the potential ramifications of what McNair (2006) has called ‘cultural chaos’. Through an analysis of several examples from this particular program, alongside interviews with its production team and qualitative audience research, this paper argues that this TV show’s engagement with political issues in a creative, entertaining way that departs from the conventions of traditional journalism, allows it to present a perhaps more authentic image of political agents than is often cultivated in the mainstream news media. This paper therefore provides clear evidence that the shift from homogeneity to heterogeneity in the news media presents a significant challenge to those who wish to heavily control public opinion. It also provides further support for an optimistic re-appraisal of entertainment which emphasises its central (not merely periphery) role in political discourse.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

Decade after decade, violence against women has gained more attention from scholars, policy makers, and the general public. Social scientists in particular have contributed significant empirical and theoretical understandings to this issue. Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. This groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the brutality of urban living. Identifying hidden crimes of economic blackmail and psychological mistreatment, and the complex relationship between patriarchy and abuse, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz propose concrete and effective solutions, giving voice to women who have often suffered in silence.

Relevância:

100.00% 100.00%

Publicador:

Resumo:

The Internet has been shown to positively influence the export activities of firms from developed countries. However, the literature is vague as to whether the Internet has an impact on the export market growth of firms form developing countries. This paper examines of a cross-national sample of 204 firms from a Latin American country (Chile). The results show that Internet marketing activities positively influence information availability and business relationships, which lead to an increase in export market growth. The findings indicate that the Internet influences not only information availability for export performance but also business relationships generally thought to be face to face interactions in nature.