bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Quiet Contemporary American Novel
Authors: Sykes Rachel
Published: May 2018

What does it mean to describe a novel as ‘quiet’? The quiet contemporary American novel defines the term as an aesthetic of narrative that is driven by reflective principles. While, at first appearance, ‘quiet’ seems a contradictory description of any literary form, because it risks suggesting that the novelist has nothing to say, this book argues that the quiet of the novel is better conceived as a mode of conversation that occurs at a reduced volume than as the failure to speak. The quiet contemporary American novel then makes two critical interventions. First, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and argues that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, quiet characters fill the novel in the Western tradition. As a phrase, ‘the quiet novel’ also has a long and untraced history, dating back 150 years. Throughout its long history, many critics have used ‘the quiet novel’ as a phrase that dismisses and derides the work of writers whose novels seem disengaged from the ‘noise’ of their wider society. The quiet contemporary American novel finally takes up the long referred to idea of quiet fiction to ask what it means for a novel to be quiet and, through discussion of a diverse selection of contemporary writers including Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole, and Lynne Tillman, asks how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy.
The British radical left and Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’
Authors: Finn Daniel
Published: May 2018

Britain’s radical left influenced the Northern Irish Troubles along two separate tracks: through its impact on British politics, and through its contacts with Irish republicanism and the Irish far left. The idea for a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland came from the far-left milieu, and was put into practice by activists who had cut their teeth on the British leftist scene. When conflict between the IRA and the British Army took centre-stage, sections of the British far left provided advice and encouragement for the Provos as they executed a left turn under the leadership of Gerry Adams, and Irish Trotskyists argued for a broad campaign of protest in support of republican prisoners. But despite their best efforts, left-wingers in Britain were unable to shift the Labour Party away from its position of support for the ‘bi-partisan’ consensus on Northern Ireland.
The Hippie Trail
Authors: Gemie Sharif , Ireland Brian
Published: May 2018

This is the first history of the hippy trail. Based on interviews and self-published works, it records the joys and pains of budget travel out to Kathmandu, India, Afghanistan and other ‘points east’ during the 1960s and 1970s. It’s written in a clear, simple style, and it provides a detailed analysis of the motivations and the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of young people who travelled eastwards. The happiness and calm that many found is noted, but the work also has a critical edge: it notes the limitations of the travellers’ journeys and the mistakes they made. We discuss the rapidly changing meanings and connotations of the term ‘hippy’, and set these themes in the context of the 1960s counter-culture.
The work is structured around four key debates: were the travellers simply motivated by a search for drugs? Did they encounter love or sexual freedom on the road? Were they just tourists? Did they resemble pilgrims? Finally a fifth chapter considers how the travellers have been represented in films, novels and autobiographical accounts.
We’ve written this book with two main audiences in mind: firstly, people with some personal interest in the trail, such as the travellers themselves (or their children); secondly, students taking courses concerned with the 1960s and its counter-cultures.
Sex and love on the road
Authors: Gemie Sharif , Ireland Brian
Published: May 2018

The chapter begins by re-telling one female traveller’s unusual experience on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Some historical context concerning the nature and limits of the ‘sexual revolution’ is given. It is pointed out that for most travellers, there was little private space, and therefore only limited opportunity for the initiation or development of relationships. The different experiences of male and female travellers are then considered: it is clear that women were usually a minority among the travellers, and that they suffered a particular form of harassment as they travelled. Male travellers’ attitudes to female travellers are considered: it is noted that they often valued them. Men’s experiences are discussed, including their contrasting attitudes to prostitution. The chapter ends by considering the experience of four travellers who found life-partners while travelling.
Epilogue: ending the journey
Authors: Gemie Sharif , Ireland Brian
Published: May 2018

The chapter begins by considering how to construct a historical analysis of the trail. It then debates the contemporary context: why would someone wish to remember the trail now? It points to a bitterness felt by many travellers. No clear political message comes from the experience of the trail, but there are some ethical implications. Did the travellers provoke a long-term hostility in the countries they visited? The chapter ends by considering the relationship between the travellers and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalists.
Reading the ‘lay of the land’: intercessory advocacy and causal process in the HIV/AIDS treatment and death penalty abolitionist campaigns
Authors: Noakes Stephen
Published: May 2018

The cases presented in this chapter—those to improve care for the HIV positive and to abolish capital punishment—jointly call attention to the need to pay close attention to sequence and causal force in TAN campaigns. The HIV/AIDS campaign is an example of ‘intercessory advocacy,’ in which a campaign seized upon an opportunity to play a role in a state-led effort to improve treatment programs. By packaging its message in a manner palatable to the state, it was able to play a role in crafting China’s emergent anti-HV strategy. The campaign to abolish capital punishment, on the other hand, exercised very little effect on China’s much publicized effort to reduce reliance of on the death penalty. Rather, the scaling back of the death penalty is driven mostly by domestic political considerations, namely a desire to retain the practice of capital punishment for purposes of crime control while simultaneously strengthening the rule of law by introducing greater accountability into the death penalty process through the highly publicized policy of ‘kill fewer, kill carefully.’
Coda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or rebranding the plantocracy’s painter: the afterlife of Brunias’s imagery
Authors: Bagneris Mia L.
Published: May 2018

The concluding chapter reiterates the major contentions of the previous chapters and examines the diverse ends to which Brunias’s images have been appropriated almost from the very moment of their creation. It opens with an investigation of a set of painted buttons in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum that have been attributed to Brunias and are purported to have adorned the coat of Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the successful Haitian slave rebellion against France. Ultimately, the chapter asserts that the fact Brunias’s work can be simultaneously described as plantocratic propaganda and as fashion fit for a Haitian revolutionary points to its complexity and continuing historical importance.
Prologue
Authors: O'Connor Adrian
Published: May 2018

This prologue surveys the institutional landscape of education in Ancien Régime France. It describes the array of formal and informal institutions offering education in pre-revolutionary France, including the petites écoles, collèges, universities, and academies. It also lays out the curricular traditions within which many of those institutions worked and highlights the relationship among the institutions, helping us to better understand why the expulsion of the Jesuits from their collèges in 1762 set off a national crisis.
Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment
Authors: O'Connor Adrian
Published: May 2018

This chapter highlights the central place of debates over education in Enlightenment thought, with particular attention to the interweaving of political and pedagogical concerns in the mid-eighteenth century. Influenced by sensationist theories of mind and of the self, thinkers during this period came to see education as formative of the individual character and of the social collective. This contributed to a deeply ambivalent strain in Enlightenment thought, one wherein the possibilities opened up by new ways of thinking about education were undercut by a sense of social, political, and institutional inertia. This ambivalent Enlightenment is analyzed in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and in debates over female education.
Introduction
Authors: Long Declan
Published: May 2018

I returned many times to the same site until another fence was erected and a new building was put in place of the empty, silent reminder. I wondered about what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there. Had it absorbed or filtered into the ground, or was it possible for others to sense it as I did?...
How effective has CERD been in protecting minorities?
Authors: Castellino Joshua
Published: May 2018

The chapter articulates the relationship between the minority rights discourse and ICERD, and looks forward to a greater understanding of its relevance to minority rights. Overall the chapter paints ICERD as a key custodian of minority rights within the UN system, a role which has been under-represented in the literature.
Introduction
Authors: Berthezène Clarisse , Gottlieb Julie V.
Published: May 2018

Historians and political scientists have deemed the twentieth century ‘the Conservative Century’, owing to the electoral and cultural dominance of the Conservative Party in Britain. While the turn of the twenty-first century portended something rather different, as a Cool Britannia-Blairite-New Labourite political class inaugurated the new millennium, and the Labour Party governed from 1997 to 2010, since then, and even more so in the fallout of Britain’s recent EU Referendum (June 2016), it looks increasingly likely that the twenty-first century may also be a ‘Conservative Century’. There are many historical, political, sociological and cultural explanations for the hegemony of the Conservative Party. One aspect that has been under-explored, however, is the party’s mobilisation of women and its positioning on gender issues. By any measure, the Conservative Party has been successful at organising women and engaging them at the grass roots, and women have supported the party at and between elections....
Conservative women and the Primrose League’s struggle for survival, 1914–32
Authors: Hendley Matthew C.
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the adaption of the Primrose League, an extra-parliamentary organization allied to the Conservative Party and having a large female membership, to the aftermath of the First World War. Founded in 1883, the Primrose League was an important vehicle for women’s participation in politics before they held the national franchise. While most historians have downplayed the Primrose League’s accomplishments after 1914, this chapter argues that the League re-made itself for its female members between 1914-1932. This chapter will show how the Primrose League deftly survived the deluge of the First World War by focusing on wartime hospitality and philanthropy and rebranding itself as a political educator of citizens newly enfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act (especially women). It will also show how the League continued to be relevant in the postwar period through a combination of anti-socialism and a consumerist version of popular imperialism. In these ways, the Primrose League did not become redundant but was able to remain a useful political weapon for the Conservative Party and an important part of Conservative political culture throughout the 1920s.
Feminist responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism
Authors: Beers Laura
Published: May 2018

In the 1970s, the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) viewed both Labour and the Tories as part of the mainstream political establishment, dominated by men and largely indifferent to women’s concerns. Now, although many feminists continue to have a contentious relationship with the Labour party, most would see Labour as, at least, the lesser of two evils. This chapter argues that it was Thatcher’s free market ethos and her emphasis on traditional family values, which she articulated from the late 1970s onwards, compounded by the cuts to social welfare programs and the marginalization of the Equal Opportunities Commission during her first government, which convinced many feminists that the two “establishment” parties were not, in fact, interchangeable. It highlights the extent to which Thatcherism was perceived by feminists to be incompatible with feminism, even if the practical record of Thatcher’s administrations was more nuanced.
Women2Win and the feminisation of the UK Conservative Party
Authors: Jenkin Baroness Anne , Childs Sarah
Published: May 2018

This chapter is an account of the establishment of Women2win, an organization created in 2005 to support the selection of women candidates for political office in the UK Conservative party. Its author is its founding, and still, co-Director, Baroness Anne Jenkin. The chapter charts the efforts of Women2win over the last decade, and discusses the issues that it has faced in securing a higher number of Conservative women MPs in the UK Parliament. In 2015 there were a total of 68 Conservative women MPs (20 percent) up from 17 (9 percent) in 2005. The chapter charts, then, considerable success for the party, although it also points out ongoing concerns about the supply pool – the number of women seeking selection – and the practical issues of seeing women aspirant candidates being selected for the party’s winnable seats.
Colleges and their alternatives in the educational strategy of early modern Dutch Catholics
Authors: Frijhoff Willem
Published: May 2018

Like other Catholic communities in Protestant jurisdictions, the Dutch had their own early modern collegial network. The early modern Dutch state is commonly known as a Protestant bulwark from which the Catholics were by and large expelled. However, due to the efforts of the Catholic Reformation and the reluctance of many Dutch to embrace Calvinism in its orthodox variety, Dutch Catholicism managed to survive on a rather large scale, though often with a particular colour marked by lay power and imbued with Jansenism, a rigid variety of Catholic theology rather similar to orthodox Calvinism. Whereas Catholic elementary education continued to be provided in private schools, Catholic colleges and universities, as public institutions, were not allowed in the Dutch Republic. During two centuries Dutch Catholics, at least the militant among them, had to go abroad for their secondary and higher education. Foreign colleges played a major role in their education and intellectual debates: the Dutch colleges of Cologne, Dole, Douai and Rome remained faithful to the Old Church, whereas those of close-by Louvain were the breeding-ground of Jansenism. Significant numbers of Dutch students went to other Catholic universities, at Reims in France, at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, or at different German universities. The Jansenist schism of 1723 led to the creation of the Old Catholic Church with its own college at home, at Amersfoort, tolerated by the Dutch authorities. The scale of the Catholic communities posed a multi-confessional challenge for the Dutch. This was overcome by a high level of official connivance, permitting the tacit creation of Catholic teaching institutions on a private basis, including some small colleges, and the organization of Catholic confraternities at the public universities. Similarly, the Calvinist ‘regents’ mostly closed their eyes to the stream of Catholic students towards foreign colleges in spite of their repeated interdiction by the States-General. This essay will look at four educational strategies adopted by Dutch Catholics to ensure their survival as a confessional community.
The domestic and international roles of Irish overseas colleges, 1590–1800
Authors: O’Connor Thomas
Published: May 2018

Like other Catholic communities under Protestant jurisdiction, the Irish, initially with Spanish assistance, provided itself with the means of educating at least some of its clergy and a small number of laity. Traditionally, the resulting Irish colleges’ network has been understood almost exclusively as the product of the religious reform of the sixteenth century and of the phased English conquest of the island. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a narrow view of their significance. It concentrated largely on the priest-producing aspect of their activities, to the neglect of their social, economic and cultural roles. This narrowness of approach has been a concern for a new generation of historians. Conscious of the social function of these institutions, some have tried to reintegrate the colleges into comprehensive, source-based explorations of their originating and target communities. This is now yielding more satisfactory accounts of their significance. Of particular importance has been work on the various roles played by the colleges in facilitating Catholic migration to the continent and in maintaining a Catholic pastoral infrastructure in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More recent studies have revealed how the colleges’ role changed over time and varied geographically and socially. It is now becoming clear how much their continued existence depended on their capacity to respond to alterations in the geo-political contexts that originally brought them into being. The relative decline of Spain in the early seventeenth century, the dominance of France from the 1660s and, perhaps most importantly, the growth of the British Empire after the 1690s crucially influenced the nature and role of the colleges. So too did directives from continental hierarchies and from Rome, frequently issued in response to endless collegial infighting. Even more significant, however, was the rapidly changing economic and political status of the Catholic communities in Ireland, to which the colleges had been providing clergy, and other services, since the 1590s. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demands, needs and aspirations of the emergent Catholic interest in Ireland posed a challenge that eventually overawed college administrations. Although European secularization and the French Revolutionary Wars were the occasion for their closure, it was the altered relationship between Irish Catholics and the imperial government that rendered the traditional role of continental colleges redundant. With growing opportunities in the imperial armies, the European connection in general was relatively less important for Irish Catholics. At the same time, the freedom to establish domestic seminaries provided the Irish hierarchy with convenient alternatives to the continental colleges, which, even in their heyday, had often seemed more trouble that they were worth. Few continental colleges re-established themselves in the nineteenth century. Those that did were only shadows of their former selves.
Transkingdom network reveals bacterial players associated with cervical cancer gene expression program
Authors: Lam Khiem Chi , Vyshenska Dariia , Hu Jialu , Rodrigues Richard Rosario , Nilsen Anja , Zielke Ryszard A. , Brown Nicholas Samuel , Aarnes Eva-Katrine , Sikora Aleksandra E. , Shulzhenko Natalia , Lyng Heidi , Morgun Andrey
Published: May 2018

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide with human papillomavirus (HPV) being the main cause of disease. Chromosomal amplifications have been identified as a source of upregulation of cervical cancer driver genes but cannot fully explain increased expression of immune genes in invasive carcinoma. Insight into additional factors that may tip the balance from making the immune system tolerate HPV to eliminate the virus may lead to markers for better diagnosis. We investigated whether microbiota affect molecular pathways in cervical carcinogenesis by performing microbiome analysis via sequencing 16S rRNA in tumor biopsies from 121 patients. While we detected a large number of intra-tumor taxa (289 OTUs), we focused on the thirty-eight most abundantly represented microbes. To search for microbes and host genes potentially involved in the interaction, we reconstructed a transkingdom network by integrating previously discovered cervical cancer gene expression network with our bacterial co-abundance network and employed bipartite betweenness centrality (BiBC). The top ranked microbes were represented by the families Bacillaceae, Halobacteriaceae, and Prevotellaceae. While we could not define the first two families to the species level, Prevotellaceae was assigned to Prevotella bivia. By co-culturing a cervical cancer cell line with P. bivia, we confirmed that three out of ten top predicted genes in the transkingdom network (LAMP3, STAT1, TAP1), all regulators of immunological pathways, were upregulated by this microorganism. Therefore, we propose that intra-tumor microbiota might contribute to cervical carcinogenesis through the induction of immune response drivers, including the well-known cancer gene LAMP3.
The effects of the phase of the menstrual cycle, hormonal contraception, pregnancy, and the marital and the parenthood status on partner preferences.
Authors: Flegr Jaroslav , Kroupa Sabastian , Nekola Ondra , Blum Amy E.
Published: May 2018

Bacground. The issue with most studies concerned with mate selection preferences in humans is that they rely on declarations and rational actions of experimental subjects, which are affected by their pre-conceived opinions and prejudices. Moreover, current research suggests that subcortical structures and processes, rather than the neocortex, play the principal role in actual partner choice behaviour. Consequently, we have only limited information on how relevant our current knowledge is in relation to real-life human ethology. Methods. To address these issues, we surveyed 2,718 women and 4,073 men between the ages of 16-50 and compared their declared and observed preferences for various properties in short-term and long-term partners. Results. We found differences between what the subjects declared to prefer and what they preferred in reality: for example, men declared that wealth was the second least desirable property out of eleven in short-term partners, but we observed that in reality, they considered wealth the third most important factor after charisma and sense of humour. Similarly, while women declared that dominance and masculinity were desirable properties in short-term partners, in the observational part of the study, they showed little preference for these traits. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of the phase of the menstrual cycle, hormonal contraception, pregnancy, and partnership and parenthood status on these preferences. We found some support for the good parents hypothesis and no support for the good genes and the immunocompetence handicap hypotheses when observed, rather than declared preferences were considered. We also detected that hormonal contraception, and parenthood and partnership status influenced declared preferences in considerable ways, but had only a small, if any, impact on observed preferences. Discussion. We suggest interpreting the results of studies reliant on declarations and rational actions of experimental subjects with great caution.
Labor Market Regulation and Reform in Greece1
Authors: Lyberaki Antigone , Meghir Costas , Nicolitsas Daphne
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes the regulatory framework in Greece at the time of the crisis and the way it has evolved since. It then reviews the theoretical and empirical literature relating to labor market regulation as a way to understand how the institutions in Greece may have affected the performance of the economy. Finally, it offers an alternative vision of a deregulated labor market supported by a robust system of welfare and social insurance, which achieves better protection and is more conducive to entrepreneurship.
Education and the Greek Economy1
Authors: Vettas Nikolaos
Published: May 2018

Education affects the Greek economy in two main ways. Expenditure for education services is a significant part of national income, hence, a better design of the education system directly contributes to overall higher efficiency and welfare. Education also contributes toward building 'human capital', a high level of which is a condition for competitiveness without a need to resort to lower wages. Public spending for education tends to be lower than the EU average, however households tend to privately spend significant amounts, especially due to the high value they assign to university education. Overall, the Greek education system is significantly underachieving its potential and its overall performance is mediocre. Lack of appropriate incentives appears to be the cause for many of the failures, as neither education units nor individuals are seriously evaluated and systematically rewarded for their progress. The State exercises excessive control over the entire system, making it too inflexible, formalistic and averse to change and adaptation to new conditions. Before the crisis, and as long as a relatively high number of graduates could find employment in sectors of the economy not exposed to competition (including the public sector), and as long as the State budget could contribute the funds that kept the system functioning, there were no incentives for reform. Education has been hit hard during the crisis: funding has decreased significantly, the institutions and rules have not improved and many high quality people have migrated abroad. However, as public finances and household savings will remain under pressure for the foreseeable future, the reform of the education system in Greece becomes an urgent priority and an important condition for growth.
Pensions: Arresting a Race to the Bottom
Authors: Panageas Stavros , Tinios Platon
Published: May 2018

This chapter argues that reforming pensions can provide only partial fixes. It sheds light on why Greek pensions present special difficulties and maintains that reforms since 2010 have not disposed of pension problems, but in some respects seem to have made them worse. As such, this chapter outlines a reform that brings in elements of prefunding as well as providers other than the state. It sketches an explicit multipillar pension system, similar to that introduced in many European countries, which can establish a stronger link between contributions and pensions. Finally, this chapter deals with the transition period, which is thought to be the Achilles' heel of pension reform because of the “double payment contention,” and proposes a solution to the transition problem that spreads the costs of transition across all future generations.
The Dysfunctional Structure of Greek Public Administration and the Challenges in Reforming It
Authors: Karkatsoulis Panagiotis , Stefopoulou Efi
Published: May 2018

This chapter highlights some key problems with the structure of the Greek public administration and some of the challenges in reforming it. It shows that administrative structures are overly complicated and rigid, and this hinders operational efficiency. Moreover, a lack of a systematic framework for performance evaluation has led to the proliferation of administrative units, including units with only few employees. Coordination across units is limited and is hampered by inadequate use of information technology. Attempts to evaluate performance and to match it with resources have been met with resistance. Attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of new regulations and streamline existing ones have had some limited success.
Infrastructures and Organizations: Embedding Members or Networking Individuals?
Authors: Dotson Taylor
Published: May 2018

This chapter describes how many contemporary infrastructures and organizations, like the Internet, road networks, and public schooling, stifle the development of thick community. Most are more like indoor plumbing than village wells: They provide no impetus toward social interaction, frame users as atomized consumers, and are impersonal and weakly democratic. Thick communitarian organizations and infrastructures are scaled to the physical limits of symbolic or embodied community, treat goods as common-pool resources to be co-governed by members, and draw residents together into dense social webs. Steering toward more communitarian technological societies will entail better recognizing how different arrangements for buying groceries or fulfilling one’s spiritual needs have ramifying consequences for the practice of community. Finally, the moral dimension of networked infrastructures and organizations is explored. The dominant “technologically liberal” understanding of these structures is paradoxical: They are celebrated as liberating, despite being largely controlled by distant managers and being incompatible with certain modes of being.
Techniques and Gadgets: Socializing Individuals or Developing Communitarian Beings?
Authors: Dotson Taylor
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins with the observation that people must learn the dispositions, expectations and capacities necessary for thick communal life. Hence, the techniques and tools that make up everyday life from birth are just as important as urban form and the Internet. The “cry-it-out” method and the provision of private bedrooms enculturates an attachment to ideas of independence and self-reliance. The narrow provisioning of youth autonomy to automobile, information and retail networks teaches children that freedom comes from detaching from one’s ties. Traditionally, youth autonomy was afforded through community rather than outside of it. Technologies like air conditioning, television, and personal digital devices encourage private cocooning over public congregation. Technologies like the concealed carry handgun and social robots provide private alternatives to the collective provision of safety and intimacy. Finally, hard to repair or overly complex technologies stymie the development of communities of repair and tinkering.
Lessening the Obduracy of Networked Urbanity
Authors: Dotson Taylor
Published: May 2018

This chapter outlines the constellation of economic, political, and cultural barriers to more communitarian urban spaces. The momentum of suburbia is shown to have as much to do with entrenched zoning rules and building codes, the mispricing of development charges and utility fees, and the lack of appropriate expertise among architects and planners as the sheer mass of already existing built form. Moving to more communitarian urban spaces will require ending the public subsidy of sprawl, changing the way mortgages are approved, ending the automatic provision of free parking, better supporting a range of more democratic urban development practices, among other changes. Finally, neighbourhood amenities, including third places, could be publicly supported and collectively governed.
Achieving Communitarian Techniques and Artifacts
Authors: Dotson Taylor
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the socio-political factors that ensure the obduracy of thinly communal domestic environments, child-rearing techniques, and consumer technologies. Sociopolitical support is lacking for heat sources that encourage congregation and for the practice of collective mealtimes. Cultural ideas and anxieties regarding sleep and child development deter parents from co-sleeping with their children. A lack of architectural imagination and municipal support makes it challenging to build vibrant and comfortable public spaces. Budget crunches and “warrior cop” culture stand in the way of more communal policing arrangements. Family members’ lack of sufficient experience working through conflict productively and several wrongheaded policies prevent the better integration of the aged into thick social webs. Finally, take back laws and tool libraries are likely be necessary if communities of repair are to flourish. In any case, targeting the artifacts that support networked individualism is probably more challenging than larger scale technologies, given the dominance of technologically liberal worldviews. Insofar as citizens see technologies as volition-enhancers rather than also barriers to desirable modes of life, any intervention is liable to be seen as infringing on their freedom.
Green Grades
Authors: Bullock Graham
Published: May 2018

A debate has emerged recently about the role of information in environmental politics. Much of this debate has focused on the emergence and effectiveness of product eco-labels and corporate sustainability ratings as a new form of environmental governance. “Information optimists” believe that the provision of information can be an effective strategy to protect the environment, while “information pessimists” are concerned that information-based approaches serve as a distraction from more effective forms of governance that rely on the rule of law. This book advances a third position of “information realism,” which acknowledges both the contributions and limitations of information -based governance initiatives. It asserts that these initiatives must develop into more mature governance initiatives for them to overcome their current weaknesses and produce long-lasting and substantial environmental benefits.
The book uses a series of in-depth case studies and an original dataset on 245 cases of environmental certifications and ratings to discuss their contributions and limitations and highlight their best and worst practices. These include programs such as ENERGY STAR and USDA Organic, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council, and LEED and Green Globes. Each chapter is organized around a different component of the information value chain that is at the heart of these initiatives, and applies concepts such as legitimacy, validity, and usability to analyze how they are both constructed and perceived. The book concludes with a set of recommendations for policymakers, designers and users of these initiatives that can improve their long-term effectiveness as a form of environmental governance.
Being Green: The Effects of the Information
Authors: Bullock Graham
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6’s discussion of the outcomes of information-based governance strategies begins with a comparison of three initiatives that evaluate electronics products – ENERGY STAR, EPEAT, and TCO. It introduces different conceptions of effectiveness, and emphasizes that different actors may have different definitions and perceptions of effectiveness. The chapter discusses a range of hypotheses and evidence related to the effects of information on consumers, businesses, government agencies, advocacy organizations, and researchers. While some evidence shows that a few existing programs have indeed created tangible social and environmental benefits, the database of 245 cases reveals that the vast majority of information-based governance strategies have failed to provide such information about their effectiveness to the public. The chapter ends with a discussion of promising and problematic practices for tracking the environmental outcomes and benefits of information-based governance strategies.
Reconfiguring the Realm
Authors: Elgin Catherine Z.
Published: May 2018

Here Elgin sketches the main themes of True Enough. Although effective scientific models and thought experiments are not true, they embody a genuine understanding of the phenomena they concern. Works of art do the same. To accommodate the epistemic contributions of science and art, epistemic normativity cannot be grounded in reliability or truth-conduciveness. Rather it emerges from responsible epistemic agency.
Epistemic Normativity
Authors: Elgin Catherine Z.
Published: May 2018

Epistemic norms are norms of responsible epistemic agency. They are the norms that would emerge from the deliberations of legislating members of a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends. Such legislators must be, in a political sense, free and equal in their deliberations.
Fallibility’s Payoff
Authors: Elgin Catherine Z.
Published: May 2018

Fallibilism with respect to knowledge is vulnerable to either a version of Moore’s paradox or to Kripke’s dogmatism paradox. Fallibilism with respect to understanding is not. The recognition of the perennial possibility of error advances understanding by sensitizing thinkers to exactly where and how they might be wrong. Thus the capacity to make mistakes is an epistemic achievement rather than a failing.
Relaxing Regulatory Controls: Vendor Advocacy and Rights in Mobile Food Vending
Authors: Wessel Ginette
Published: May 2018

Beginning in 2008, city policymakers across the nation became increasingly involved in regulatory debates and policy revisions surrounding mobile food vending. Despite vendors’ abilities to reactivate neglected urban areas and increase food access for underserved neighborhoods, many issues related to unfair competition, public health and safety, and prejudices continue to dominate regulatory frameworks that limit vendors’ entrepreneurial freedoms and spatial opportunities. Using three regulatory conflicts between food vendors and policymakers, this chapter highlights the motivating factors that can guide regulatory decision-making and the ways vendors destabilize and shape formal mechanisms of regulatory control. Topics include public health, restaurant protectionism, and cultural injustice at both state and city levels. This research suggests that despite rigid regulatory policies and the variety of economic, social, and political factors that influence governments’ responses to mobile food vending, active municipal investment in the public realm combined with vendors’ grassroots efforts can generate just policies. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the significance of vendor advocacy and the supportive roles of food vending organizations across the United States to illustrate the ways vendors increase social justice in cities.
From Hippie to Hip: City Governance and Two Eras of Street Vending in Vancouver, Canada
Authors: Hanser Amy
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the contrast between street vending and city regulatory responses in Vancouver, Canada during two time periods—the 1970s and the 2010s. The comparison of “hippy” vending in the 1970s and “hip” food carts and trucks four decades later illustrates the contradictory impulses that shape regulation of commercial activity on city streets. First, there is a process of “formalization” that seeks to tame the informality and messiness of street vending through new rules, standards and regulations. But by the 2010s, a second, contradictory, impulse appears: an embrace of informality reflecting new ideas about “vital” city streets and identifying street vending, in the form of food trucks and carts, as “hip.” But the apparent embrace of the informal has unfolded through highly formalized procedures, and the vitality associated with vending in Vancouver is acceptable precisely because it has been (re)introduced in a highly formalized, regulated form.
Why Local Regulations May Matter Less Than We Think: Street Vending in Chicago and in Durham, North Carolina
Authors: Martin Nina
Published: May 2018

Regulating food trucks and street vendors is a policy issue facing many cities across the U.S. This paper compares the street vending regulations in Chicago, IL and Durham, NC, cities which have pursued opposing approaches. Chicago, IL maintains a strict policy, while Durham has a liberal policy towards the sale of street foods. Despite the regulatory variation, similar inequities among groups of street vendors exist. Namely, both cities have a set of gourmet food trucks that operate in the central business district and gentrifying neighbourhoods, and a set of immigrant vendors that are excluded from these spaces. Regulation, therefore, cannot be credited with reducing inequities in the bifurcated labour practices of the street vending industry. Rather, variation in regulation is found to have minimal influence on the practices of street vendors across the two cities. Therefore, changing regulations from restrictive to liberal is an imperfect solution, contrary to the findings of much of the literature. Instead, structural inequities between vendors should be addressed.
Breach, Bridgehead, or Trojan Horse? An Exploration of the Role of Food Trucks in Montreal’s Changing Foodscape
Authors: Nash Alan
Published: May 2018

After a seventy-year ban, the Canadian city of Montreal began a pilot program in 2013 that permitted a limited number of food trucks back onto its streets. Such an experiment offers opportunities to re-evaluate the “traditional view” that food trucks are part of an informal economy in which new arrivals to a city can create jobs for themselves, and the contrary positions that newer “foodie” food trucks have either opened a “breach” with that informal economy by catering only to the more affluent, or offer instead a “bridgehead” by bringing newer cuisines to the street where everyone can experience them. This paper explores the merits of these viewpoints through analysis of the long-running debate over Montreal’s ban on food trucks; the pilot program’s regulations permitting such trucks back into the city; a survey of the goals of the trucks’ operators; and, fourthly, an analysis of customer reviews on the social media site Yelp. This evaluation concludes that Montreal’s food truck experiment should not be interpreted as either a “breach” or a “bridgehead” – rather, it represents the use of food trucks as a pawn (or “Trojan horse”), in a much larger strategy by city planners to promote Montreal through “place branding”.
Is It Local … or Authentic and Exotic? Ethnic Food Carts and Gastropolitan Habitus on Portland’s Eastside
Authors: McClintock Nathan , Novie Alex , Gebhardt Matthew
Published: May 2018

In this chapter, examine the location of ethnic food cart owners within Portland, Oregon’s food cart scene, and within the broader paradigms of local food and sustainability for which the city is known. Through an inventory of food carts, interviews with cart owners, and a case study of the Portland Mercado food cart pod, we explore how the everyday practices of ethnic food cart owners on Portland’s eastside reflect and differ from those of other food cart owners. Drawing on Bourdieu, we demonstrate how their practices in turn reshape the wider “gastropolitan” field of foodie tastes. We argue that cart owners unsettle the eco-centric values dominating Portand’s foodie culture by emphasizing authenticity and exoticism. The ability to capitalize on a particular set of gastropolitan values – local and organic or authentic and exotic – is geographically uneven, however; it depends on both the physical agglomeration of food carts espousing a particular set of gastropolitan values, and on their location within the foodscape, a position very much tied to economic processes of gentrification and displacement bifurcating the city.
Environmental Impact Assessment: Can Procedural Innovation Improve Environmental Outcomes?
Authors: Andrews Richard N. L.
Published: May 2018

Environmental impact assessment originated in U.S. environmental policy as an “action-forcing mechanism” to compel integration of environmental policy goals into government agencies’ missions and actions. It subsequently was adopted by more than 100 other countries, as well as international lending institutions and many businesses, and inspired additional types of impact assessments. At its best, it has greatly expanded the documentation of environmental impacts, required consideration of less damaging alternatives, increased opportunities for review by independent experts and the public, caused modification or cancellation of some proposals, and increased environmental awareness as well as expert capacity for identifying environmental impacts. However, it has often been applied only to localized projects, rather than to broader and more consequential policies and programs, and sometimes without consideration of alternatives. In many cases it has been used simply as a paperwork requirement rather than a decision document. And it has often been criticized, sometimes unfairly, for causing delays and paperwork burdens. Overall, it has proven to be an important conceptual innovation in increasing both awareness of environmental impacts and the transparency of government (and in some cases, business) actions causing them. To fully achieve its intended purpose it requires commitment to that goal by those using it.
Sustainable Development: Linking Environment and Development
Authors: Langhelle Oluf
Published: May 2018

This chapter starts with the origin of the concept sustainable development and establishes what the innovation of sustainable development represented – the merging of environment and development. It then explores what has happened with this concept in its 30 years of existence in terms of two key questions: What has been the impact of sustainable development? Has sustainable development made any difference at all? These questions are discussed in light of two different but equally important issues that have permeated the whole complex of global environment and development linkages since the late 1960s: the question of (environmental) limits and the question of economic growth. The chapter argues that sustainable development is both simple and notoriously complex. It is simple in the sense that it builds on intuitive ideas which merge environmental and developmental concerns. It is complex in the sense that it demands the cooperation of all countries in a globalized, competitive, capitalist system. Further, the merging of environment and development is argued to be inescapable–there is simply no way out of the sustainable development equation. Sustainable development will therefore continue to be the main framework for the integration of the challenges of environment and development.
Environmental Justice: Making Policy, One Skirmish at a Time
Authors: Baehler Karen
Published: May 2018

Environmental justice refers to both a concept and a social movement that originally spun off from the American civil rights establishment in the 1980s. The core idea focuses on the now well-established fact that members of vulnerable population groups tend to experience disproportionately higher levels of exposure to environmental hazards, less access to green amenities, and fewer opportunities to have their environmental concerns heard and remedied compared to their wealthier and whiter counterparts. Environmental justice terminology is deeply embedded in contemporary environmental discourse and governance in multiple countries, but its ability to alleviate real instances of environmental mal-distribution has been strongest at the local level thanks to the concept’s power to mobilize diverse networks of activists around local causes.
The Long Shadow of History: The Biogeographical Origins of Comparative Economic Development
Authors: Galor Oded
Published: May 2018

This chapter explains how the growing evidence for the relevance of preindustrial policies naturally questions the endogenous emergence of the institutions and the environmental conditions that favored their implementation. The literature recently moved to exploring the determinants of the economic and demographic transitions, and hence of comparative developmental patterns, in the very long run. Examples of these newly explored factors are the persistent effects of historical events, such as the spread of humans across the globe and the differential timing of the Neolithic transition in different regions of the world. Another aspect in this context is geographical variation in agricultural suitability, which shaped the incentives for long-term investment, delayed consumption, and might have generated variability in the long-term orientation across societies.