Charting New Frontiers in Democracy: A Romani Voice in Parliament

This Institute is one of those rare projects which both look good on paper and, once initiated, far exceed the hopes of their originators. Starting in Nairobi in October 1963, in a single office, with the publication of a journal and the sponsorship of seminars, it today has five separate departments, all of which are growing rapidly.The Institute is the result of a meeting held in Berlin in early 1963 between representatives of foundations and a group of prominent East Africans, including Tom Mboya, who wished to establish a private organisation which could serve as a discussion forum on problems of regional public interest. From this idea emerged the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, which is fortunate to have as its patrons President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Dr Milton Obote, Prime Minister of Uganda.

In 1990s, the French saw America as both an incentive for change and an example to be shunned. If the New World's successes—for example, in economic growth—were admired, the ways Americans employed to attain such prosperity were to be avoided. In short, America was simultaneously a model and an antimodel. What the French accomplished in the 1990s was to adapt features of the American way, without admitting it, in an effort to find their own way forward. This chapter addresses policies of the Fifth Republic that were explicitly, or in some instances only implicitly, inspired by the American model. It deals with economic and social policy, business practice, and cultural affairs. In economic and social policy, the focus is on issues like economic and technological competitiveness, unemployment, and the welfare state. In cultural affairs, the focus will be on language—that is, the spread of American English—and on the audiovisual sector.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was formally established, as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, at the first conference of Muslim heads of state convened in Rabat, Morocco, in September 1969. OIC’s Directorate of Culture, Social and Family Affairs comprises two separate departments, the Cultural Affairs Department, which focuses on Islamic cultural issues, the protection of Islamic sites and interfaith dialogue, and the Social and Family Affairs Department. An OIC Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women in Member States was adopted in November 2016 by the sixth session of the Ministerial Conference on Women. OIC’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs works to co-ordinate the delivery of emergency relief and rehabilitation assistance to Muslim communities affected by conflict or natural disasters. The OIC supports education in Muslim communities, and was instrumental in the establishment of Islamic universities in Niger and Uganda, the American Islamic College of Chicago, and the Islamic Solidarity Centre in Guinea-Bissau.

The Arab League, composed of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan, Saudi-Arabia, and Yemen, was established by the pact signed by these states on March 22, 1944. According to the pact, which may be regarded as the League's constitution, the League has as its purpose to strengthen relations between the member-states, to coordinate their policies in order to achieve cooperation between them, and to safeguard their independence and sovereignty. With due regard to the “organization and circumstances of each state,” cooperation is to be effected specifically on 1) economic and financial affairs: commercial relations, customs, currency, and questions of agriculture and industry; 2) communications: railroads, roads, aviation, navigation, telegraphs and posts; 3) cultural affairs; 4) nationality, passports, visas, extradition, and execution of judgments; 5) social affairs; and 6) health affairs.

Even though transgender people continue to experience violence and discrimination in many aspects of life, there has been progressive recognition of their experiences and demands in recent decades. This article analyses the process of claiming civil rights and the evolution of health care for transgender people in Spain, from the mid-1970s to the present day, paying particular attention to the narratives of key actors involved. To this end, three socio-historical periods are identified: (1) the travesti period (the mid-1970s to the early 1990s), characterised by strong social and institutional transphobia and resulting self-care practices; (2) the transexual period (mid-1990s to the 2000s), when demands for health care were institutionalised under a pathological medical model; and (3) the transgénero or trans period (2010s until the present) when identity and bodily autonomy have been re-claimed through a socio-cultural prism that has denounced pathologisation. At each stage, political, social and economic factors intervened at both national and international levels to trigger an ongoing negotiation between transgender movements and dominant social institutions, all within a changing universe of social values.

Within both scholarly research and wider public debate, profound influence on contemporary cultural and social affairs — positively and negatively — is attributed to new media, such as the internet and mobile phones. New media are regarded as either revolutionizing or significantly transforming culture and society, at both the level of global political power and the level of intimate human relationships. At the macro level of social affairs, Castells (2009) suggests that the internet allows a historically new form of ‘mass selfcommunication’ that may reconfigure the distribution and exercise of power in the network society. At the micro level of social affairs, Turkle (2011) provides a very critical view of new media and emphasizes that social relationships suffer in an online world: ‘The ties we form through the internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy […] We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other’ (pp. 280–1). New media are also transforming older forms of mass communication, such as broadcasting and journalism, to the extent that we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift in mediated communication. Deuze (2007) prophesies that ‘journalism as it is, is coming to an end. The boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication […] are vanishing, the internet makes all other types of news media rather obsolete’ (p. 141).

If this seminar had to be characterised in one or two words, these might be ‘provocative’ and challenging'. Under the auspices of the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, 45 artists, scholars, and government representatives, from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, met to survey the cultural scene and discuss some of the problems facing creative artists in all media. Sixteen papers were presented, but the most fruitful results of the seminar came from the intense discussions that followed each, often lasting far beyond the allotted hour.

René Gallissot, Variations on Man and Society : The Social Sciences between National Integration and Social Criticism Founded in 1966, L'Homme et la Société announced the final breaking-up of the discipline of sociology in May 1968 under the influence of structuralism, which led to the preeminence of anthropology within the social sciences. From this moment, micro- positivism and methodological individualism turned attention away from consideration of social relations. This process was completed by inter-disciplinary rivalries. Professionalization and the continuing process of specialization are related to the development of increasing governmental direction of social and cultural affairs. The social sciences are now called upon to reinforce national and social integration, and this role is relatively incompatible with social criticism. Should social scientists fear compromising themselves as they study the very relations which tie them to social institutions ? Have the social sciences become dependent upon or extensions of the State and the business community ?

This paper investigates an aspect of study abroad programs that has rarely been studied before: the training needs of local education professionals in Spain. Through a mixed-method, using a questionnaire completed by 103 participants, and interviews with 15 of them, we focus on their previous formal specific training and their perspective on the group of students they work with. Results show that most of them have rarely been trained on how to work as cultural facilitators for students from the US. This fact often creates a cultural gap and prevents the teachers from fulfilling their role as cultural bridges for students. Specific action needs to be taken in order to solve this lack of preparation in this group of professionals.

Launching a Translation Course for a U.S. University's Study Abroad Program in Spain

In Memoriam: Nancy F. Marino Joseph T. Snow I was deeply saddened in early 2018 to learn that my former colleague, Nancy Frances Marino, was too exhausted to continue teaching her Spanish classes at Michigan State University. She had been diagnosed with cancer in May of 2017 but kept it secret from friends and colleagues and, with the unfailing support of her husband, Frank McBath, underwent treatment. Lamentably, Nancy passed away on March 10, 2018. On June 17, she would have been sixty-seven years old, but looked and felt much younger and, until her cancer diagnosis, was one of the most active and resourceful people I ever had the privilege of knowing. She was a weekly presence at her gymnasium, watched her diet and maintained healthy habits (she did not smoke), avoiding all excesses as a matter of course. [End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo of Nancy F. Marino courtesy of Frank McBath. Nancy was born in New York in 1951, obtained a B.A. from State University of New York-New Paltz, and went directly for her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her forty-four-year academic career began as a visiting professor at Indiana University (1974–1976). She was tenured at the University of Houston and rose to Associate Professor and served three years chairing her department. She moved to MSU in 1993, becoming a Full Professor in 1995. Having been Chair of the Department at Houston, her administrative skills soon became evident at Michigan State. Her peers in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies chose her three times to be its Acting Chair and twice she served the Chair as his associate chair. She also rose to hold a University-wide post as a Consultant to the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies, developing brand new programs in the Humanities for paid leaves. Nancy spent many of her summers directing the MSU Study Abroad programs in Spain (Denia, Cáceres and Valencia). Her academic and teaching successes led to her being named Distinguished Professor in 2012, and being selected to [End Page 6] receive the Paul Varg award for excellence in teaching (awarded, sadly, post-humously). Her solid reputation as a scholar led to her being invited to deliver public lectures in universities in the USA and in Europe, to name but a few, those in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Lyon, Barcelona, Salamanca, Colorado and Virginia. Nancy was a resourceful organizer as well. In 1988, I founded a group called IMANA (Ibero-Medieval Association of North America) dedicated to organizing sessions at the annual international congress of medievalists held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As a colleague, she helped in its early years by organizing transport to the annual IMANA banquet at BRAVO, identifying those who had cars and those who needed rides. Our first banquet had 15 attendees and when I retired in 2006, BRAVO could no longer accommodate us as their limit was 75 and our banquet attracted more than that. The 2006 banquet, attended by Alan Deyermond and Samuel Armistead as special guests, was the first held on the campus of WMU, had no less than 110 attendees, and Nancy was especially important in making it feel more intimate. In time, many hispanomedievalists would come to prefer the informal atmosphere of the Kalamazoo congress to the MLA. Indeed, Nancy took over all the IMANA organizing dating from 2005, when I was in a phased retirement program and living in Madrid, and she did a splendid job through 2017 in her annual “performance” as Master of Ceremonies at the banquet on the WMU campus via a catering service. She would go from table to table, eliciting from a spokesperson the accomplishments (promotions, tenure, new books, awards, etc.) of those at each table, always to general and enthusiastic applause from the others. In my annual post-retirement visits to Kalamazoo, Nancy Marino was the hostess par excellence and beloved of all hispanomedievalists attending. In the sessions she carefully organized—in one year there were seven—she was ever open to the new specialties (border studies, feminism, cultural studies and more) being added to more standard medieval topics. In the...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss, evaluate, and illustrate the experiences of a City‐as‐Text © exploration in partial fulfillment of the requirements of an honors study abroad program in Spain. First, the nature and procedures of City as Text © as a learning tool are explained, followed by a list of necessary conditions for its application. Then the honors college in question is introduced, along with its special study abroad programs, and the experiences of various explorations are discussed and evaluated.

In many parts of the developing country, women have far more financial chance overall today than they did a generation ago. Women’s health, education, and labor force contribution levels have grown significantly, rising living standards and strengthening humanities worldwide. Nowadays, despite women’s tendency toward participation in economic, social, and cultural affairs, females’ entrepreneurship became so limited and there seems to be no optimal use of their abilities in business. However, a prominent indication of developed countries is female entrepreneurship. A method for increasing women’s participation in economic affairs and business is conducted by appropriate plans and policies by government officials. Current research is done by using library and survey. Studies in the research show that knowing different aspects of business and the method in which each person enters the area, can save the country from economic crisis according to behaviorist psychologists.

Since the Democratic Progressive Party won the Taiwan 2016 presidential campaign, Beijing has established a dual-track policy framework featuring “selective engagement” to address thes talemate across the Taiwan Strait. The “selective engagement” policy can be characterized as a set of complementary approaches, basically a combination of containment and engagement measures. In terms of the issue areas, it is a combination of confrontational measures in security, political and diplomatic fields, with comparatively encompassing approaches on economic, social and cultural affairs. In terms of the policy counterparts, it is a combination of punitive measures against the “Taiwan independence” activists, with accommodative approaches to all the other politically non-pro-independence forces. In conclusion, this article analyzed the challenges inherent in Beijing’s current dual-track policy.

The United Nations, as the central core, coordinates the steps taken to establish international peace and security and to develop friendly relations between countries, based on the principle of equality of rights and autonomy of nations, and achieve international cooperation in the sphere of economic, social and cultural affairs and encourage governments to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Hence, all countries should, with respect to membership in the organization, act in accordance with the obligations under the Charter and resolve all their international disputes through peaceful means, based on the principles of justice and international law. However, there are two methods for recognizing international law: the method of social cognition and rational method. The social recognition method of the international system is to abandon theoretical insights of international law and address existing facts and to extract the patient and accurate historical and social data that constitute the living material or the substance of the legal rule. The method of the logical recognition of the principles and rules of international law is to explain the nature and method of legal argument that has a significant impact on the proper understanding of the legal rules and the recognition and analysis of international law and finally the introduction of a system governing international relations. Using the first method, the international community is described first. Then, its life is studied in motion (inductive method); as using the second method, the accuracy and inaccuracy of those cases and judgments are evaluated, which are the introduction of other judgments (deductive method). These two methods, that is, the objective observation of events and logical reasoning, if coordinated, will pave the way for the analysis of the international system and explain its characteristics, and international law will be in its place.