Working from below: Exploring the subversive quality of technological affordances along the Mediterranean

An active citizen must ensure that government policies truly represent people’s best interest and not those of a handful of rulers. Citizens are expected to play their functional role by seriously participating in the entire democratic process. But this decision to participate or not depends on their awareness, adherence and internalization of democratic values. This paper examined the extent to which Nigerian undergraduate youths are regulated by democratic ethos of equality (one-man-one vote), patriotism, honesty, respect, tolerance, rule of law, etc. while discharging their civic duties. To investigate the study, three research questions and two hypotheses were raised. The descriptive survey method was employed wherein 586 undergraduate youths from four universities in Edo State were sample for study using the purposive sampling techniques. Frequency count, percentages and t-test statistics were employed as analytical tools. At the end of analysis, the study concludes that undergraduate youths awareness, understanding, internalization and adherence to democratic values during civic practices is selective of institution types (whether public or private) but not selective of programmes (whether full-time or part-time). It was recommended among others that the majority of uneducated youths that has been noted for high level of incivility, undemocratic behaviours and attitudes in the various literature cited in this work be exposed to democratic values through Social Studies, Non-formal and Adult education programmes, all agencies such as National Orientation Agency(NOA), Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), etc. and civil society groups. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n6p469

Introduction. The relevance of the topic is determined through the rationale for the transition of youth civic activity to the digital environment, which forms a new digital civic consciousness and defines digital participation as a fundamentally new format of civic self-determination and youth activity. Theoretical justification. The problem of transition and mutual complementation of civic activity in traditional offline and digital online formats is considered. Both the advantages of digital activism and the contradictions arising from its use, such as distrust of efficiency, lack of resources, etc. are shown. The issue of local certainty of interaction between online and offline forms of activism associated with cultural, political and other conditions is understood. A provision is put forward on local activism as the initial stage of involving young people in civic practices, and the use of digital technologies as the most understandable way for the younger generation. Methods. Empirical data obtained in the course of a sociological survey as part of an intelligence strategy using in-depth interviews. The informants were 14 residents of Yekaterinburg aged 18-25 years. Results and its discussion. The results of the study made it possible to show the predominance of non-political forms of youth civic engagement. The repertoire of civic participation has an expanded character, however, it is mainly associated with the solution of socially significant problems at the local level. The role of social networks and blogging as mechanisms for mobilizing civic position and youth activity is shown. The level of willingness of local authorities to cooperate with youth activists is regarded as rather low. The main model of youth is hybrid activism, built on a combination of online and offline practices, with a fairly pronounced position about the unwillingness to abandon offline activism completely in the direction of digital civic participation.

Onward migration: An introduction

From ignorance to familiarity: Contextual knowledge and the field researcher

In 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.

The optimization of CDMA deployed over the legacy analog network is shown to be a complex series of issues and a function of both the intrinsic capacity of CDMA and some practical considerations associated with the incumbent AMPS system. The implications of voice rate, voice quality, deployment strategy and timing on overall network capacity are analyzed together with practical issues of managing the interference between the two networks with use of appropriate guard zones and guard bands etc. The maintenance of call quality, handdown and flawless network operation in the border areas of the dual-mode and analog network are analyzed by including appropriate usage of border and beacon cell sites and CDMA equipment parameters such as cell size. Some of the options available to the network provider in order to balance and optimize the trade-offs between coverage, quality and capacity are analyzed together with how best to proceed in an on-going basis as the growth of both analog and CDMA traffic continues.KeywordsCode Division Multiple AccessTime Division Multiple AccessCode Division Multiple Access SystemCell SiteAnalog NetworkThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard ‘borders’ of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.

State control over Greece’s agricultural institutions increased during Metaxas’s authoritarian regime (1936–41). Analysing such state control allows us to address, in the Greek context, two questions with regard to fascist agrarian regimes. First, considering the trajectory of agricultural policy before the emergence of these regimes, how much of what they did was new, and how much was not? Second, how did the cadres of agricultural specialists participate in, or at least accommodate, the new regimes? Our research shows that Metaxas received support from the agronomists who had been active in Greece under previous liberal administrations. Such support did not take the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. Metaxas’s dictatorship inherited most traits that made it a fascist agricultural regime from previous liberal administrations.

The uncertainties in the distribution network makes it difficult to accurately obtain the system state and realize system optimal control. The development and application of synchronous phase measurement technology helps to achieve reliable operation of the distribution network with spatial-temporal uncertainties. The Lingang smart distribution network demonstration project is operating based on the synchronous phase measurement application technology system for smart distribution networks. First, this paper introduces the basic construction of the demonstration project. Second, the key techniques for state estimation in distribution networks based on PMU measurement are summarized. Then the project integration framework design and state estimation application scheme are presented respectively. Finally, the effectiveness of the state estimation module in the demonstration project is analyzed. The results indicate that the state estimation can accurately estimate the system operating state. The state estimation is performed every 5 seconds in this project. Compared with the traditional power system state estimation, the proposed method significantly shortens the calculation interval of the state estimation and can quickly track the states of the distribution network.

Voltage regulation is imperative for the successful operation of electricity distribution networks, especially with a high penetration level of photovoltaic (PV) systems. Power compensation control (PCC) that uses both reactive power compensation and active power curtailment has shown promising results in alleviating voltage rise problems. It crucially relies on real-time communications among distributed PV systems. However, the transmission of state measurements and control signals in PCC is hampered by inevitable communication delays. Therefore, it is important to not only estimate the maximum tolerable communication delay (MTCD) but also develop an alternative technique for PCC under abnormal communication delay (ACD) conditions. This article presents a delay-tolerant predictive PCC for voltage regulation in distribution feeders. After estimating the MTCD based on voltage and power mutation, it uses normal PCC for effective operation when communication delay is within MTCD, or switches to predictive PCC under ACD conditions. An accurate prediction is achieved using a double neural network with online adjustment of weights and samples. Simulations on a sample distribution network demonstrate the effectiveness of our presented approach.

Memory production, vandalism, violence: Civil society and lessons from a short life of a monument to Stalin

This chapter assesses how nationwide government programs are implemented at the neighborhood level across the country through two case studies: the provision of neighborhood care for the aged and service provision in newly urbanized neighborhoods. The analysis of the first case highlights the government's purchase of services, which outsources the provision of public goods and services such as education, healthcare, or infrastructure to private firms and civil society groups such as charities or other nonprofits. Neighborhood service provision in newly urbanized neighborhoods largely deals with the legacy and influence of previous village service provision. Both case studies suggest a trend of gradually increasing involvement of non-state organizations in government programs as collaborators or partners. Yet, even though non-state actors and organizations have gradually secured more flexibility in implementing government programs, they operate continuously under state control and government supervision.

This article examines Australian indigenous participation in environmental planning to challenge some of the claims made by advocates of more participatory modes of planning. Calls for the enhanced participation of civil society in planning are associated with an international trend toward the decentralization and devolution of many areas of natural resource policy and state responsibility. Democratic decentralization has been widely advocated as being more efficient and equitable than state control. These claims are examined with reference to three stories involving environmental planning and Australian indigenous peoples. The stories suggest that rather than a “new political economy of planning” whereby the spaces for democracy are enlarged by the activities of civil society, the participation of civil society and decentralization can result in political processes whereby public deliberation is suborned by interest group politics.

This short article explores trans mothering as an embodied practice of popular sovereignty in the context of the Syrian state army. Moving beyond traditional state-centered and militarized masculinities that shape scholarly notions of sovereignty, I demonstrate how trans mothering—embodied through listening, care, and affirmation of fellow soldiers—became a mode of antiwar world-making amid Assad’s counterrevolutionary war. The article centers on the story of Duaa, a trans woman whose gender identity was denied by the Syrian state. Forcibly conscripted and sent to the frontlines in the Damascus suburbs, Duaa developed everyday practices of trans care and support toward fellow soldiers, reorienting military service around mutual support rather than state control. Building on ethnographic research and life history interviews in Lebanon, I engage with Syrian–Palestinian writer Naya Rajab’s approach to trans mothering and Amahl Bishara’s theorization of popular sovereignty as a disruptive force against authoritarian rule. Through this framework, the article illustrates how Duaa’s trans mothering temporarily shifts the army’s hierarchy into acts that nurture mutual care rather than sovereign obedience. Her trans care reimagines sovereignty not necessarily through resistance, but through the everyday reconstitution of state power on state military bases. Finally, the article argues for a reconsideration of popular sovereignty in post-Assad Syria, where massacres and displacement continue to serve as technologies of sovereign rule under Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The city of Gdynia since 2003 is the organizer of one of the biggest music festivals in Europe. City count about 244 000 inhabitants and the festival in 2015 appeared about 120 000 people. Arrange transport for such a large number of people is a huge problem for city authorities and organizers. Changes in traffic conditions and freedom of movement around the city are cumbersome for inhabitants of the city. Gdynia has access to the maritime port; freight transport is an inherent image of the city. The city has a specific location of the infrastructure, in the centre of the city is a port. Port is divided city into northern and southern part. Residents of the north can only use the road infrastructure to get to the south and to the city centre. The city provides festival participants with free access to the festival area by city buses. This article presents the loss of time generated by increased traffic on the road during festival days. The reliability of the urban network laden by the traffic of passenger vehicles, trucks to the port as well as special festival buses is based on calculations of the mathematical model. The data on which the model was developed come from TRISTAR's (Tricity's Intelligent Transportation System) - the vehicle counting system and traffic metering station. This System allows to count the time of each vehicle which has been detected by the induction loop and thus the time intervals between vehicles. The data are compared with the festival days and typical days of operation in the transport network.