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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social work > Aid & relief programmes
Storms strike! When natural disasters take place there is always an
a consequence. The survivors of dangerous storms have to rebuild
their lives. There is a new beginning after the storm. You only
have two decisions in life. You can choose to live or you can
choose to die. These are the survivors who chose to persevere
through devastating tragedy, to live!
The contemporary world is characterized by the massive use of
digital communication platforms and services that allow people to
stay in touch with each other and their organizations. On the other
hand, it is also a world with great challenges in terms of crisis,
disaster, and emergency situations of various kinds. Thus, it is
crucial to understand the role of digital platforms/services in the
context of crisis, disaster, and emergency situations. Digital
Services in Crisis, Disaster, and Emergency Situations presents
recent studies on crisis, disaster, and emergency situations in
which digital technologies are considered as a key mediator.
Featuring multi- and interdisciplinary research findings, this
comprehensive reference work highlights the relevance of society's
digitization and its usefulness and contribution to the different
phases and types of risk scenarios. Thus, the book investigates the
design of digital services that are specifically developed for use
in crisis situations and examines services such as online social
networks that can be used for communication purposes in emergency
events. Highlighting themes that include crisis management
communication, risk monitoring, digital crisis intervention, and
smartphone applications, this book is of particular use to
governments, institutions, corporations, and professionals who deal
with crisis, disaster, and emergency scenarios, as well as
researchers, academicians, and students working in fields such as
communications, multimedia, sociology, political science, and
engineering.
Many communities in the United States have been abandoned by the
state. What happens when natural disasters add to their misery?
This book looks at the broken relationship between the federal
government and civil society in times of crises. Mutual aid has
gained renewed importance in providing relief when hurricanes,
floods and pandemics hit, as cuts to state spending put significant
strain on communities struggling to survive. Harking back to the
self-organised welfare programmes of the Black Panther Party,
radical social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter are
building autonomous aid networks within and against the state.
However, as the federal responsibility for relief is lifted, mutual
aid faces a profound dilemma: do ordinary people become complicit
in their own exploitation? Reframing disaster relief through the
lens of social reproduction, Peer Illner tracks the shifts in
American emergency aid, from the economic crises of the 1970s to
the Covid-19 pandemic, raising difficult questions about mutual
aid's double-edged role in cuts to social spending. As sea levels
rise, climate change worsens and new pandemics sweep the globe,
Illner's analysis of the interrelations between the state, the
market and grassroots initiatives will prove indispensable.
Drawing from eleven rich case studies in Asia, this book is the
first to explore how heritage is used as aid and diplomacy by
various agencies to produce knowledge, power, values and
geopolitics in the global heritage regime. It represents an
interdisciplinary endeavour to feature a diversity of situations
where cultural heritage is invoked or promoted to serve interests
or visions that supposedly transcend local or national paradigms.
This collection of articles thus not only considers processes of
"UNESCO-ization" of heritage (or their equivalents when conducted
by other international or national actors) by exploring the
diplomatic and developmentalist politics of heritage-making at play
and its transformational impact on societies. It also describes how
local and outside states often collude with international
mechanisms to further their interests at the expense of local
communities and of citizens' rights. Heritage as Aid and Diplomacy
in Asiaexplores the following questions: Under the current
international heritage regime, what are the mechanisms of-and the
manipulations that take place within-ideological, political and
cultural transmissions? What is heritage diplomacy and how can we
conceptualize it? How do the complicated history and colonial past
of Asia constitute the current practices of heritage diplomacy and
shape heritage discourse in Asia? How do international
organizations, nation-states, NGOs, heritage brokers and experts
contribute to the history of the global heritage discourse? How has
the flow of global knowledge been transferred and transformed? And
how does the global hierarchy of cultural values function?
Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis,
every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every
thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world,
critical medications that treat these deadly diseases are scarce,
costly, and growing obsolete, as access to first-line drugs remains
out of reach and resistance rates rise. Rather than focusing
research and development on creating affordable medicines for these
deadly global diseases, pharmaceutical companies instead invest in
commercially lucrative products for more affluent customers. Nicole
Hassoun argues that everyone has a human right to health and to
access to essential medicines, and she proposes the Global Health
Impact (global-health-impact.org/new) system as a means to
guarantee those rights. Her proposal directly addresses the
pharmaceutical industry's role: it rates pharmaceutical companies
based on their medicines' impact on improving global health,
rewarding highly-rated medicines with a Global Health Impact label.
Global Health Impact has three parts. The first makes the case for
a human right to health and specifically access to essential
medicines. Hassoun defends the argument against recent criticism of
these proposed rights. The second section develops the Global
Health Impact proposal in detail. The final section explores the
proposal's potential applications and effects, considering the
empirical evidence that supports it and comparing it to similar
ethical labels. Through a thoughtful and interdisciplinary approach
to creating new labeling, investment, and licensing strategies,
Global Health Impact demands an unwavering commitment to global
justice and corporate responsibility.
Bread from Stones, a highly anticipated book from historian Keith
David Watenpaugh, breaks new ground in analyzing the theory and
practice of modern humanitarianism. Genocide and mass violence,
human trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the
early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background
for this exploration of humanitarianism's role in the history of
human rights. Watenpaugh's unique and provocative examination of
humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes
beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development
projects. Employing a wide range of source materials literary and
artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts
from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats
Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity
of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern
humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and
international organizations help victims of war, care for
trafficked children, and aid refugees. Bread from Stones is
required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its
ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the
evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.
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