Online Lightning Talks
The Influence of Welfare Spending on Measles Immunization
Online Lightning Talk Mary Ellen Walker
The political and economic contexts in which people live have important implications for their lives. Welfare policy may reflect this political-economic context because it can influence the human experience, including health. Previous research has explored how welfare policies influence health, but no research has explored how welfare generosity influences the relationship between a health intervention and its outcome. Furthermore, no research on welfare policy has used spatial analysis. This study explores the influence of welfare generosity on the relationship between measles vaccination rates and measles cases over time and geographic location using all country-level data available from 1990 to 2016. Control variables include female employment rate, world region, gross domestic product per capita, level of democracy, and the Gini inequality index. Generalized linear mixed model regression is used to quantify the relationship between welfare generosity and measles data, and spatial models and maps will be used to determine the influence of geographic location on this relationship. Results reported include the overall influence that welfare generosity has on the relationship between national childhood measles immunization rates and national measles cases. The influence of time and geographical location is also discussed. This research allows public health professionals to consider new ways of looking at the larger influences on health. It also provides public health professionals with examples of countries where welfare generosity policies are having a positive influence on prevention interventions for health. This research may inspire further study of the influence that policies have on health interventions.
Is Reasonable Accommodation a Viable Policy Approach for Multiculturalism? : A Case Study of Quebec
Online Lightning Talk David Perez Des Rosiers
Globalization has created a new dynamic reality for nation-states with an increase of immigration leading to cultural mixes. Even if it can be said that immigration movements have been mainly from the peripheral countries to the West, that system seems to become more global than ever with rising economic countries that are opening more such as China. This offers a prospect of more pluralist societies in a near-future. States have decided to adopt different policies towards multiculturalism. However, tensions between cultural homogenization and culture heterogenization are central in contemporary global interactions leading to conflictual situations. Quebec is an interesting example of such interactions with its policy or ‘’reasonable accommodation’’ which can be understood as adjustments of a system to support and offer more fairness for individuals or group of people. Multiple scholars have addressed the idea of cultural identity in such process such as Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg. With the increase of multiculturalism, it is relevant to explore if reasonable accommodations are a viable solution to global multicultural challenges. This paper offers a critical analysis of this type of accommodation towards multiculturalism. It reviews prominent scholars on cultural studies and multiculturalism to contextualize reasonable accommodation. Also, it analyzes the case study of Quebec to reflect the positive and negative aspects related to such cultural accommodation. It concludes that reasonable accommodation offers a partial solution to global multiculturalism, but that cultures are to complex, different, and dynamic in a specific world-system not allowing global openness towards cultural accommodation.
The Utopian Character of the Counter-movements: Reading Karl Polanyi in the Twenty-first Century
Online Lightning Talk Rondelez Pieter
In the introduction of the 2001 edition of The Great Transformation, Fred Block argues that we all have much to learn from the insights of Karl Polanyi. Relying on Polanyi’s arguments in the Great Transformation is not only useful in order to understand the history of market liberalism, but also for the contemporary debate on globalization and its contestation. The work of Karl Polanyi is inspiring a lot of academics nowadays who are studying the global uprisings since 2008. Some academics – like Block - argue that neoliberals embrace the same utopian visions of their predecessors which lead to counter-movements that are resisting marketization processes and its political and economic consequences. Relying on Polanyi’s work, I point to a danger of interpreting the current neoliberal order as a similar trend towards marketization as in the period that Polanyi is dealing with in his book. Misinterpreting the current marketization project raises questions not only about the feasibility of re-embedding the economy back into society, but also about the desirability of disembedding society from the economy. In concrete, I argue that the utopian character shifted from the marketization project to the counter-movements that are trying to resist and change it. This also raises questions about the role of social scientists in (studying) the process of social change in the twenty-first century.
Right of Indigenous Peoples to Self-Determination and its Implementation in Tibet: Exploring Indigenous Rights in Tibet
Online Lightning Talk Hari Har Jnawali
This paper examines how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has incorporated the provision regarding the right to self-determination in its domestic legal and constitutional instruments. In international norms, the meaning of the right to self-determination has evolved from the right to secession to the right to inclusion within State. This understanding has made, at least, in principle, the concept of political secession irrelevant. The PRC government has developed legal and constitutional frameworks endorsing the right of indigenous peoples to autonomy, to internally allow them to exercise the right to self-determination. Despite this normative development, indigenous peoples are not satisfied with the implementation of autonomy provision in Tibet. They continue to demand the implementation of the international provisions on the right to self-determination, by providing them ‘genuine autonomy’ in indigenous territories. But the government dismisses this demand as a design for secession, stressing that already autonomy provisions are sufficient to allow indigenous peoples to let them exist as distinct communities, and pursue social, economic, political and cultural development. In this background, this paper investigates- why does the PRC government hesitate to implement the provision regarding the right to self-determination in Tibet? It argues that the PRC government is reluctant to implement the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination due to fear of secession. It thus responds to international provision by devising strategies that project the PRC in good international image and neutralize the risk of secession. In other words, it respects autonomy in principle, and rejects its implementation in practice.
Sociolinguistic Perspective of the Effect of Advertising Language as a Sender of Symbolic Values through the Use of the Foreign Language in Advertising
Online Lightning Talk Iván Manuel Sánchez-Duarte, Juan Miguel Alcántara-Pilar
Language is being used for symbolic purposes in international advertising. When targeting consumers in international markets, companies strategically use language to position themselves in those markets in their advertising campaigns, which as a consequence of globalization has become a global phenomenon. The present work studies that characteristics associated with the transmission of symbolic value through language related to factors that group these characteristics. In addition, which productive sectors are related to foreign language is reviewed as an indicator of the country of origin effect. To achieve our objectives, an experimental design was carried out, using seven foreign languages for the individuals participating in the study. A commercial audio slogan was created, in each language, for a total sample of 405 participants. The results show differences between the different languages analyzed in terms of the transmission of symbolic value and the country of origin effect.
The Disparity of Social Movement between China and Hong Kong: Does Identity Matter?
Online Lightning Talk D.W.L. Ho
For decades, the changing articulation of patriotism has been traced in various domains. Simply put, patriotism has been viewed as one of the necessities of being a good citizen and the term often denotes a specific loyalty virtue. Patriotism can motivate people together to overcome crisis. Thus, when coronavirus epidemic has been faded in China, it is believed that such a result can be attributed to the current solid practice of loyalty among citizens in China. The success of anti-epidemic, however, is destined to motivate an increasingly strident blend of patriotism. Nevertheless, what as if a society is willing to use preemptive violence to defend the nation? Take social movement as example, the notion of popularity is a long standing topic all over the world. However, while there are worldwide emergence of social movements. The fundamental question that arises then is why there is a disparity of social movements between Hong Kong and China? While the emergence of social movement in Hong Kong have become much more radical and diverse, what are the forcing factors to make the social movement can run away with the impact from the other regions. For these reason, this study explores patriotism to verify its key predictors and mediators for the betterment of identity in depth. More importantly, this study want to review whether the notion of identity is a core factor to distinguish the different way-outs towards social movement between China and Hong Kong.
Economic Models and Economic Reality: The Method of Imaginary Constructions and the Issue of Realism in Economics
Online Lightning Talk Ionela Baltatescu
The use of models and imaginary constructions in economic science is an indispensable tool of research in order to cope with the complexity of economic reality. But, as M. Blaug points out, economic science had increasingly become an “intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world”. Economic scientists seem to be caught in an inescapable dilemma of either building rigorous analytical models with little practical relevance or throwing out models altogether and dealing only with economic history. The purposes of the paper are: (1) to demonstrate that the lack of realism of some economic theories and policy recommendations is not necessarily the result of building economic models per se; it is rather the result of how imaginary constructions are designed and used (based on the assumption that economic reality is more or less an imperfect replica of the mathematical models designed by the theorists); (2) to methodologically appraise different types of economic models and imaginary constructions employed in economic research; (3) to discern the methodological requirements of building models relevant for understanding the economic world.
