Disadvantaged Position Research Articles

The correlation of climate change and mortality: climate change as a factor for health inequalities

Abstract Recent research has found robust evidence that climate change is often negatively impacting on human health. These impacts are distributed spatially unequal both across the countries of the world and within the countries. While research has clearly outlined this unequal distribution on the country level, for instance with the recently added non-optimal temperature risk factor of the Global Burden of Disease 2019 dataset, thereby acknowledging the impact of unfavorable average temperatures on health, the spatial differences in climate change impacts on health on the subnational level is hardly researched. By operationalizing climate data for a climate change trend analysis of various climate change parameters in GIS, and by applying mortality data for different high-, low-, and middle-income countries on administrative area level 2 for both an Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) and Geographically Weighted (GWR) regression analysis, the proposed article is analyzing the unequal impact of climate change on health inequalities within different countries. Under the assumption that climate change-induced changes of local climate-related conditions affect those areas that already are in a disadvantaged position when it comes to health inequality, the paper is expected to show that inequality gaps are further widening due to climate change, not only but especially in low- and middle-income countries that are more affected by climate change than most of the high-income countries. Therefore, it will have to be discussed, how these increasing health inequalities can be dealt with in a just way and under consideration of already existing vulnerabilities in the most affected areas of climate change. Key messages • Climate change directly influences mortality in all analyzed countries with a bigger impact on low- and middle-income countries. • Climate change contributes to widening health inequalities on a subnational level and especially in low- and middle-income countries.

What inhibits the progress of early-career women in Karachi? Studying the effects of socio-spatial mobility barriers on women's employment.

There is a widespread acceptance and shift towards sustainable, inclusive and smart mobility solutions around the world. However, in Karachi, poorly coordinated urban planning, lack of effective governance structure and investment in transport, has allowed the growth of an almost unregulated and ungovernable informal transport sector. Women are more severely affected by the poor service since men not only have more space allocated to them on public transport but also have the freedom to use alternative and cheaper private vehicles such as motorbikes and cycles. Poor representation of women in the transport sector further aggravates the situation. The paper aims to highlight the gender-disaggregated effects of poor transport design, provision and lack of personal agency on mobility, for emphasising the social and cultural attitudes faced by female employees. It argues that not integrating the gender-based disadvantages faced by women into planning, reinforces their disadvantaged position and force them to take complex trips. Scenario-based questions were designed for focus group discussion which covered not only the everyday mobility challenges but also their reactions to the potential solutions. For a gender-based comparative analysis, two separate focus group discussions were organised. Adopting a sector-based mapping approach of the issues discussed in the groups helped understand the complexity of female user experience at various levels, starting from planning or discussing the trips with families, to making modal choices. It also helped to tease out the impact of these issues on their employment opportunities as early-career women. The model proposed in this paper can help illustrate where changes can be made in the system considering the social aspects of transport.

Contextualizing the work-family experiences of women in the Nigerian banking industry

ABSTRACT At the intersection of culture, ethnicity, gender, and religion, this paper offers insights into the lived experiences of Nigerian women by adopting Nkomo and Ngambi’s multilevel framework on African women’s leadership to understand their work-family experiences in the Nigerian banking sector. Employing data from interviews with eleven Northern women and ten Southern women who live in the following states: Kano, Kaduna; Akure, Lagos, Ibadan; and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, the findings confirm the existence of patriarchal systems at the macro (social), meso (organizational), and micro (individual) levels of social action that shape Nigerian women’s work-family experiences. Nevertheless, as tradition and modernity interact to provide a hybrid social space within which these women negotiate the different levels, they demonstrated the ability to redefine femininity and womanhood and reject constraints that confine them. The women from both regions resisted conformity to the patriarchal systematic ideologies and cultural processes that placed them in a disadvantaged position. Despite social and cultural criticisms that restrict women’s movement and career options, their agency was evident in their narratives.

Is ambiguity a source of inequity? Nominalization in sustaining and effacing power asymmetries

This article explores the tendency to nominalization in legal discourse from different perspectives, underscoring arguments from the field of critical discourse analysis (in particular, those related to the detrimental consequences that omitting the agent may entail), and offers a qualitative case study regarding the use of nouns in the informative texts given by the Spanish Social Security department on its web about a minimum wage benefit scheme. For this case study, we have used the framework proposed by Willerton (2015) involving his BUROC model, aimed at identifying the circumstances in which plain language should be a priority. As an answer to the question posed in the title of this article, the findings suggest that excessive nominalization harms the lay reader’s ability to comprehend and, as a result, places him or her in a disadvantageous position in legal settings; however, the results also indicate that it is the writer’s overall lack of empathy towards the reader which ultimately has the most negative impact on legal communication.

WOMEN HAS BEEN AN IMPORTANT SEGMENT OF THE WORKFORCE

The Indian labor market displays several striking features: very low rates of female labor force participation; considerable variance in rates of female labor force participation across Indian states; and a large share of both women and men working in the informal sector. Various types of people work at various types of jobs. A substantial portion of India's workforce historically has been made up of women. The work participation rate of women of India is showing a downward trend in the last few decades. It also signifies that women’s entry or exit of labour market is influenced by non-economic factors also. The study finds that there is neither quantitative nor qualitative improvement in women’s employment over time on account of structural changes in the economy. There is no major occupational diversification in women’s employment despite structural shift of the economy from primary to tertiary sector. Agriculture is still the leading sector in women’s employment. Overcrowding of workforce in agriculture largely as wage labourers, lower earnings, poor literacy levels, large-scale informal employment and most self-employment in the form of unpaid work are indications of women’s disadvantaged position in the labour market. Women are primarily seen as ‘caregivers’ for the family, even when they contribute to the family’s financial needs. This paper tries to find out that the position of women in workplace and in the family.

A city in the process of revitalisation in the opinion of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Results of a pilot qualitative study

The article presents the results of a qualitative pilot study conducted to reconstruct both the representation of the city from the perspective of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods (DN) in Łódź (Poland) and the configuration of its determinants. Exploration of the city, regulated by the principles of the qualitative content analysis method included exploratory walks (research participant + two students) and a discussion with a group of youth from DN – participants of a youth club established in one of the local educational institutions. The study results present a city full of spatial divisions in which the disadvantaged position of young people from DN becomes evident. The reconstructed picture of the relationship between space and places reveals discursive, cultural and economic mechanisms of extending the power of some groups of citizens over others, whose intersectionality in the era of intensification of revitalisation processes is reflected in the identity processes of these young people. The conclusions of the study encourage its continuation on a larger and more purposefully diverse research sample as well as a revitalised discussion around the role of social professions in revitalisation processes.

Analysis of Regional Division of Labor in Value Chain Patterns and Driving Factors in the Yangtze River Delta Region Using the Electronic Information Manufacturing Industry as an Example

The electronic information manufacturing industry is characterized by a very significant intra-product specialization and can display the characteristics of a regional division of labor. Looking at the existing literature, most studies have mainly examined the position of different countries in the spatial division of labor from the perspective of global value chains, with fewer empirical analyses at the city level or regional scale. Furthermore, deepening the regional division of labor in value chains is an effective way to promote regional industrial synergy and high-quality economic development. Based on the number of listed enterprises and the total number of parent–subsidiary investment connections in the electronic information manufacturing industry, this study reveals the characteristics of the deeper regional division of labor among cities by analyzing the Value Chain Division Index (VCDI). Subsequently, we used the fractional response regression model to analyze influencing factors. We found that, firstly, the core cities are dominated by the production of high-value parts, while the peripheral cities are mainly dominated by the production of middle- and low-value parts. Specifically, northern Anhui, northern Jiangsu, and southwestern Zhejiang are obviously in a disadvantaged position regarding the regional division of labor in the value chain. In the production of middle- and high-value parts, there are close investment connections between the core cities, and only a few peripheral cities maintain a certain degree of connection with the core cities. Therefore, there is a need to further strengthen industrial investment connections between the core and peripheral cities. Secondly, the regional division of labor in the value chain in the Yangtze River Delta region shows the following characteristic: a “one super, many strong” pattern. That is to say, the VCDI value of Shanghai is the highest, and the VCDI value of Suzhou, Ningbo, and Wuxi is also relatively high, while the VCDI value of peripheral cities is relatively low. Furthermore, we found that there is a relatively obvious regional division of labor among cities, but the core cities have strong homogeneity in the high-value areas. Therefore, it is necessary to further strengthen the dislocation of competition between core cities. Thirdly, the model results show that rising land prices and construction in the development zones at the provincial and national levels both have significant contributing effects on the enhancement of the regional division of labor in the value chain, while the innovation inputs, innovation outputs, and their interaction terms show a negative effect. There is a need to further enhance the efficiency of innovation transformation and improve the quality of innovation transformation in order to promote upgrading in the value chain.

Role of spiritual experiences in shaping the quality of intergenerational relationships - exploring views of older adults in South India

ABSTRACT Objectives To investigate how the older adults in India use spiritual thoughts and practices in their everyday lives to shape intergenerational care relationships and cope with challenges in such relationships. Methods Twenty-five qualitative interviews were conducted with older adults aged 55 to 85 years from two South Indian states from the diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis principles. Results The analysis shows that the spirituality of older adults shapes the quality of relationships with their kin. Participation in daily spiritual exercises such as prayer, chanting, self-reflection, and text reading help older adults develop personal resources such as a sense of peace, patience, acceptance, and forgiveness. This personal transformation helps older adults gain a stronger understanding of their kin and reduces pressure on the quality of intergenerational relationships in the family. They see spirituality as a vehicle, providing a structure for knowledge exchange, joint participation in religious events, and spiritual discussions with family members and others in the community. These experiences strengthen older persons’ emotional bonds with their families and help them develop larger social networks. Conclusion Spiritually inspired resources seem to help older adults to transform their disadvantaged position into a more rewarding and productive state.

Lexical Creativity in Community Translation Corpus from Ghana

Although corpus-based research is becoming more common in many languages and in translation studies in general, it tends to be scarce or even nonexistent in Akan and many other African languages that are often considered as minority languages. In fact, failure to use Akan in various fields has hindered its development to some extent, particularly in online electronic resources, human language technology and for optimising online presence. Thelimited availability of resources, such as reference corpora and specialised dictionaries, suggests that translators who work from and into Akan often have to rely solely on their ingenuity in the process of translation. The study, therefore, explored a bidirectional English–Akan parallel corpus, built earlier by the researcher in another study. Using the descriptive translation studies approach, Skopos theory and Baker’s (1992) translation strategies, the paperanalyses lexical creativity as a strategy used to resolve translation problems specific to the language pair: borrowing, compounding and reduplication. Akan may not be a typical minority language, but it is in a disadvantaged position compared to English, which serves as the official language. Consequently, many documents are primarily written in the official language, thereby creating a form of imbalance in terms of language development and translationchallenges for community translators and interpreters who work from and into Akan. The research sheds light on how the abovementioned corpus can empower community translation in Ghana. It also identifies lexical creativity as an effective strategy to stimulate the need for the development of such a community language and to curb the imbalance in relation to English regarding terminology, text-type development, reference resources and translation tools. As translation tools such as Linguee rely on parallel corpora, the bidirectional English–Akan parallel corpus may be uploaded online or enlarged to develop general and professional language tools, and can serve as a basis for other enquiries.

Luce Irigarays Body Theory and Film Rouge: Female Image of Courtesan Ruhua

The representation of charming female bodies is a distinct characteristic of feminine movies directed by Guan Jinpeng. Rouge, one of his representative works, illustrates the hope and despair of a courtesan named Ruhua. Although several studies revealed the political metaphor of her body image, few researchers put emphasis on the female sentiment behind it. Therefore, by means of textual analysis, this study explores the life experience of Ruhua mirrored by her body image based on three theoretical perspectives proposed by Luce Irigaray in The Sex Which is Not One, including market value, sexual pleasure and class oppression of the female body. The research finding is that in Rouge, lens languages such as compositions, lights and clothes are conceived elaborately to depict Ruhuas body feelings, which not only implies her disadvantaged position in terms of wealth, sex and power but also reflects her individual consciousness against her dominated body as she is craving for maintaining a relatively equal relationship with her lover. The body narrative in Rouge subverts traditional films made by other male directors that commodify the female body under the male gaze and sets an example for the future feminine movie of how the depiction of the female body destroys gender power.

Функционирование марийского языка в системе школьного образования в прошлом и настоящем

The study aims to obtain results showing the functioning of the Mari language in the school education system starting with its first appearance in the curriculum up to its current disadvantaged position in Mari El schools. Some reasons that have led to this situation are also identified. To solve the problem, the author reviews the available scientific works of Mari and other scholars, census and sociological survey data, as well as federal and regional laws relating to the education system and the Mari language. Attention is also paid to those significant events in the country that influenced both the state of the education system and the psychological mood of the population. The article consists of two sections – the Mari language in the past and in the present. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it is the first to show the functioning of the Mari language in school education in comparison, covering both the 18th and 19th centuries and the 21st one. The 20th century was omitted deliberately, as it has already been described in a number of the author’s earlier papers. The results obtained showed that the situation with the study of the Mari language in schools is still unsatisfactory for a number of reasons and that the regional authorities pay insufficient attention to the vitality of the Mari language, the preservation of which directly depends on its position in the school education system.

Marriage and Disadvantaged People: A Qualitative Inquiry of Inter-ethnic Marriages Among Low-income Families

This study employs a phenomenological approach to examine inter-ethnic marriages among low-income families in Srinagar, Kashmir, by looking at the factors that lead to these marriages and the ways in which they are negotiated. By doing so, the study’s goal is to put the spouses’ pre-marital experiences in context. Participants were recruited using snowball and purposive sampling techniques determined by theoretical sampling. The broader results of the study found that some males only seek such marriages when they fail to find a spouse from their own Kashmiri ethnic background because of their socially disadvantaged position like poverty, physical disability or being over-aged. Under these circumstances, the other option they consider is going for inter-ethnic marriages, which in the present context, entails seeking wives from outside mainland Kashmir belonging to other ethnic groups, while the reasons operating from the female spouse participants were widespread poverty and the desire to avoid dowry.

Niger Delta Subaltern Agency and Resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky

This article applies the theoretical positions of some scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective to the reading of poetry by Niger Delta writers. I argue that the Niger Delta people are subaltern in the Nigerian national space due to their disadvantaged sociopolitical position as well as the resource conflict that has left the region at the mercy of the state and its agents. With insights from the writings of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee, I read the subaltern themes of agency and resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky. In adopting this framework, I draw from Guha’s original theorisation of peasant insurgency and the structure of power as well as later theorisations of relational power discourse and subaltern agency. My close reading of selected poems reveals the figure of the Niger Delta subaltern as the architect of their own destiny and whose resistance haunts the dominant discourse of the nation. The notions of insurgency, the nation and its fragments, failed revolutions, and relational power discourse are deployed as hermeneutical strategies. My adoption of this theoretical approach recovers its insights for the reading of literary works by writers from minority groups.

Ethnic and religious identities in Russian penal institutions: A case study of Uzbek Transnational Muslim prisoners

Russia has become one of the main migration hubs worldwide following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of migrant workers travel to Russia from three Central Asian countries. However, Russian immigration laws and policies are ambiguous and highly punitive. The result is that many migrants resort to undocumented status working in the shadow economy, which places them in a disadvantaged and precarious position. In this position they are vulnerable to becoming targets of the Russian criminal justice system as they take to crime to overcome economic uncertainty, become embroiled in interpersonal conflicts ending in violence, or fall victim to fabricated criminal charges initiated by Russian police officers under pressure to produce their monthly quota of arrests. The impact on Russian penal institutions is that they have become ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse sites as a consequence of the incarceration of growing numbers of transnational prisoners. Using person-to-person interviews conducted in Uzbekistan with men and women who served sentences in Russian penal institutions during the past two decades, we show in this article how the large-scale migratory processes have transformed Russian prisons into sites of ethnic and religious plurality, in which formal rules and informal sub-cultures - the colony regime, so-called thieves' law (vorovskoy zakon), ethnic solidarity norms, and Sharia law - coexist and clash in new ways compared with the status quo ante. Thus, we argue there is a need to revise the prevailing understanding about the power dynamics in Russian penal institutions. Our findings undermine the prison service's insistence of the ethnic and ethno-religious neutrality and cosmopolitanism of Russian penal space, which is presented as a latter-day manifestation of the Soviet-era 'friendship of nations' policy. Russian prisons today must be understood as sites of ethnic and religious pluralism.

Can fiscal decentralizationand farmers' use of internent be the route to the digitalization performance in China? A novel approach towards unlocking the role of online marketing behavior and performance ofagricultural products.

It is believed that the respondents' disadvantageous positions and the information asymmetry that exists between them are the bottlenecks that contribute to the stagnation of trades and the poor revenue that respondents receive from agro-products. Digitalization and fiscal decentralization both play an important part in helping to increase the information literacy of respondents who live in rural areas. The purpose of this study is to investigate the theoretical effects that the digital revolution has had on environmental behavior and performance, and it also analyzes the part that digitalization plays in the process of fiscal decentralization. This study investigates the impact that farmers' usage of the Internet has on their information literacy, online sales behavior, and online sales performance using research data collected from 1338 farmers in China primarily produce pears. Primarydata was collected andutilized to develop a structural equation model, using the partial least squares (PLS) and bootstrapping methods; according to the findings, the use of the Internet by farmers has a significant positive effect on the improvement of their information literacy, and it will promote their online sales of pear through the improvement of their information literacy. The results show that the use of the Internet by farmers will improve the online sales performance of pear due to the improvement of farmers' information literacy.

COVID-19 and All-Cause Mortality by Race, Ethnicity, and Age Across Five Periods of the Pandemic in the United States

Racial/ethnic and age disparities in COVID-19 and all-cause mortality during 2020 are well documented, but less is known about their evolution over time. We examine changes in age-specific mortality across five pandemic periods in the United States from March 2020 to December 2022 among four racial/ethnic groups (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian) for ages 35+. We fit Gompertz models to all-cause and COVID-19 death rates by 5-year age groups and construct age-specific racial/ethnic mortality ratios across an Initial peak (Mar–Aug 2020), Winter peak (Nov 2020–Feb 2021), Delta peak (Aug–Oct 2021), Omicron peak (Nov 2021–Feb 2022), and Endemic period (Mar–Dec 2022). We then compare to all-cause patterns observed in 2019. The steep age gradients in COVID-19 mortality in the Initial and Winter peak shifted during the Delta peak, with substantial increases in mortality at working ages, before gradually returning to an older age pattern in the subsequent periods. We find a disproportionate COVID-19 mortality burden on racial and ethnic minority populations early in the pandemic, which led to an increase in all-cause mortality disparities and a temporary elimination of the Hispanic mortality advantage at certain age groups. Mortality disparities narrowed over time, with racial/ethnic all-cause inequalities during the Endemic period generally returning to pre-pandemic levels. Black and Hispanic populations, however, faced a younger age gradient in all-cause mortality in the Endemic period relative to 2019, with younger Hispanic and Black adults in a slightly disadvantageous position and older Black adults in a slightly advantageous position, relative to before the pandemic.

Government Intervention in Employment in Indonesia Based on Welfare State Theory

The emergence of the theory of the welfare state provides wider intervention to the state, in this case the government, especially in seeking the welfare of society, including in terms of employment. The Indonesian Constitution affirms philosophically that promoting public welfare is the responsibility of the government so that its role in employment is very much needed. The relationship between workers/laborers and employers arises from existence of a working agreement. The nature of the prevailing work assention is decided by the boss straightforwardly putting the position of the worker/laborer as the frail party. Therefore, even though at first the employment relationship only involved workers/laborers and employers, it needs to be regulated and supervised by the government as a form of protection for workers/laborers who are always in a disadvantageous position. The presence of the government as the maker and implementer and supervisor of employment policies is a form of implementation and development of welfare state concept. This concept emphasizes that the state does not only maintain law and order but is mindful for looking for the welfare of the individuals. The presence of the government as the maker and implementer and supervisor of employment policies is a form of implementation and development of the concept of the Welfare State. This concept emphasizes that the state does not only maintain law and order but is responsible for seeking the welfare of the people. The presence of the government as the maker and implementer and supervisor of employment policies is a form of implementation and development of the concept of the Welfare State. This concept emphasizes that the state does not only maintain law and order but is dependable for looking for the welfare of the people.This welfare state hypothesis was received within the introduction to the 1945 Structure of the Republic of Indonesia. So that inside the scope of work relations it cannot be isolated from the part and destinations of the State.

'My cousin said to me . . .' Patients' use of third-party references to facilitate shared decision-making during naturally occurring primary care consultations.

In this paper, we explore the ways in which patients invoke third parties to gain decision-making influence in clinical consultations. The patients' role in decision-making processes is often overlooked, and this interactional practice has rarely been systematically studied. Through a contextual narrative exploration of 42 naturally occurring consultations between patients (aged 22-84) and general practitioners (GPs) in England, we seek to fill this gap. By exploring how and why patients invoke third parties during discussions about medical treatments, who they refer to, what kind of knowledge their referents possess, and how GPs respond, our main aim is to capture the functions and implications of this interactional practice in relation to decision-making processes. Patients refer to third parties during decision-making processes in most of the consultations, usually to argue for and against certain treatment options, and the GPs recognise these utterances as pro-and-contra arguments. This enables patients to counter the GPs' professional knowledge through various knowledge-sources and encourage the GPs to target their specific concerns. By attributing arguments to third parties, patients claim decision-making influence without threatening the GPs' authority and expertise, which their disadvantaged epistemic position demands. Thereby, patients become able to negotiate their role and their epistemic position, to influence the agenda-setting, and to take part in the decision-making process, without being directly confrontational. Invoking third parties is a non-confrontational way of proposing and opposing treatment options that might facilitate successful patient participation in decision-making processes, and so limit the risk of patients being wronged in their capacity as knowers.

Analysing Citizen-centric Administration in the Context of Assam with Special Reference to Assam Chah Bagicha Dhan Puraskar Scheme

Citizen-centric administration is one of the significant components of good governance. Public administration in India has been trying to provide different measures for the welfare of marginalised and disadvantaged sections of the society. Tea-garden workers of Assam are significantly in a disadvantaged position since the colonial period. Low wages, poverty, illiteracy and poor socio-economic conditions of the tea-garden workers of Assam have further pushed them into a marginalised state. Therefore, the Government of Assam has adopted different welfare mechanisms for the upliftment of the tea-garden workers of the State. It is in this context that the present study tries to analyse the role of the Assam Chah Bagicha Dhan Puraskar Scheme (Tea Garden Financial Incentive Scheme) primarily aimed at financial inclusion of the tea-garden workers of Assam as a step-forward to citizen-centric administration. This article also highlights the perception and challenges of the tea-garden workers while accessing the financial inclusion measure in their respective tea estates.

Asian Americans and Income Inequality: Disparities Between and Within Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Groups

Asian Americans nearing economic parity with White individuals is unique, particularly given the historical and contemporary disadvantaged position of other racial minorities in the U.S. labor market. While there is growing literature exploring how Asian Americans are reshaping the labor force, most of these studies categorize them as a homogenous group, failing to recognize social, cultural, and historical diversities within the community. Using the Current Population Survey, we investigate income disparity trends across ethnic groups and gender. Results show that Asian American men and women have high income levels compared to other racial minority groups. However, these perceived advantages reinforce racial stereotypes and mask income variations within these groups and across genders. We find a widening gender income gap over recent years for Asian ethnic groups, highlighting how race and gender interact to shape their labor-market experiences. We conclude by discussing the implications for future studies in labor-market research.