Fragmented World Research Articles

Goodbye, Thank You, and Hello!

Change sometimes comes slowly, sometimes with astonishing speed. It has been a privilege to serve as the editor of The American Journal of Cosmetic Surgery (AJCS) for the past 7 years, and it’s hard to believe that it has been this long. The AJCS has been published by Allen Press for even longer. This issue represents the last installment of our long and fruitful partnership. Just as the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery (AACS) has undergone profound changes in the last 2 years, moving from an internal management, physical office space model of internal association management to a virtual office run by a contractual management firm, so now will The Journal also be altering its structure. We are moving to SAGE Publications. This move, undertaken by our management team, transfers ownership of the journal to an independent, academic publisher responsible for more than 850 journals and 800 books across a spectrum of medical, scientific, business, humanities, and social science fields. In preliminary meetings with SAGE staff I have been impressed by their commitment to making The AJCS a distinguished resource for cosmetic surgery research and education. Plans include digitizing the entire back catalogue of the journal, open access to past and future articles, and creating a partnership with the AACS that will continue to ensure the integrity and value of the cosmetic surgery scientific enterprise. We will also be upgrading the details of our instructions to authors, establishing more comprehensive ethical guidelines in keeping with contemporary clinical research standards, and broadening the horizons of our contributors, reviewers, and readers. Allen Press has been a wonderful partner in the journal enterprise, and this departure is not about any fissures in our relationship, but rather is a not uncommon event in the publishing world. By shifting ownership of The AJCS to this larger multinational corporation, it is anticipated that we can enhance the reach and stature of the journal while at the same time reducing overhead costs for the AACS. Both are desirable outcomes in the increasingly fragmented and competitive world of scientific publishing. For the past couple of years my own inbox has received daily invitations to serve as editor of, reviewer for, or contributor to a new, self-proclaimed, “international” “worldwide” “open access” journal of some kind, increasingly narrow and specialized, or so broad as to be laughable, and most frequently built on a business model of “pay to publish,” where the authors are required to subsidize their publication. In this process, peer review is frequently minimal, negligible, or absent. Scientific or clinical standards of accuracy, precision, and trustworthiness are held to the lowest common denominator. The free flow of relevant, important, and valuable information is clogged by this sludge of valueless dreck. The entire enterprise of scientific publishing is currently undergoing a revolution. More “scientific” articles are published daily than were annually a few decades ago. Simultaneous publication, while still considered unethical, continues unabated. Plagiarism, outright fraud, and financially conflicted results are being published without proper references, acknowledgment of conflicts, or proper

Reaching the summit: explorations in meaningful learning through community engagement

Reporting from a conference on higher education teaching and learning for a planning journal is perhaps uncommon. However, the 3rd International HETL conference co-organised with the annual Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement meeting at Utah Valley University (UVU) addressed an issue of ever increasing importance for universities of the 21st century: learning through community engagement. Which or what communities, who is learning and what kind of engagement was left open, which allowed for multiple perspectives to be addressed.Universities have traditionally engaged with society and community for purposes of research, knowledge exchange and dissemination. In fact, Bourner (2008, 26) suggested that western universities are defined by a tripartite mission consisting of 'the higher education of students, the advancement of knowledge [through research] and service to those outside the walls of the university'. Community-based, engaged learning in the form of, for example, service-learning, internships or live projects is mainly associated with the educational and external service elements of this overarching mission. Students tend to enjoy the experiential and authentic learning experiences provided through such engagements, which allow them to apply curricula based knowledge to real world problems. Community-based engaged learning is pedagogically valuable and can also provide benefits to the communities in which it is situated.Community engagement and community-based, engaged learning occurs across all subjects and disciplines - although it is undoubtedly more prevalent in some, including planning. Indeed, planning academics frequently engage in a variety of communities for research or to provide expert support, while a significant number of course curricula include forms of community engaged learning. In the UK a typical pedagogy in this context are live projects, for which students conduct research and consultancy type work for a charity, community group or local authority, for example. Such activities are ideal to prepare students for future employment as well as to introduce the concept of collaborative planning. Yet, while community engagement in teaching and learning is practiced, there are few occasions to share experiences aside from the occasional session on co-learning, community participation activities in curricula or democratisation of planning in traditional planning conferences. Thus, this conference provided a unique opportunity for sharing practices across disciplines as well as for deeper discussions around emerging approaches and thinking in community engagement and learning not only amongst educators, but also between educators and university leaders.The conference's thought-provoking premise was that in the globalised, highly interconnected and simultaneously fragmented world in which we live in, educators will have to rethink how to prepare students to lead meaningful lives, economically, personally and socially. Invoking Hoy and Johnson's (2013) vision of an emerging future for higher education institutions which challenges students to be more engaged and self-directed in all aspects of their learning and development and institutions to become more engaged with the wider community in which they exist - delegates were invited to explore how to foster community engagement to be transformative, integrated and beneficial for all.The conference was book-ended with plenary sessions by high profile speakers who underscored the breadth of the conference theme '...meaningful learning through community engagement' with different interpretations. For example, Milton Cox (Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA) focused on communities within the university among teaching staff - or rather - the general lack of community in academic culture suggesting that this sets a poor precedent for students. Nevertheless if learning communities (also labelled as 'communities of practice') among teaching staff are formed they were found to be useful and contributing to the enhancement of teaching, learning and research as well as organisational development. …

The Hubris of the West in a Fragmented World: Global Economic Governance at Risk

Bibliography: Gabusi, Giuseppe: The Hubris of the West in a Fragmented World: Global Economic Governance at Risk, ERIS, 2-2015, pp. 94-107. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v2i2.20682

Rethinking Sikh Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century

This article seeks to draw attention to some of the core issues which beset the study of Sikh nationalism as a coherent phenomenon in an increasingly globalized and socially fragmented world. First, it highlights the importance of revisiting the debate about the community's religious boundaries, arguing that in contrast to the new conventional wisdom informed by poststructuralism, Sikh identity has exhibited a remarkable degree of continuity from the establishment of the Khalsa in comparison with other South Asian religio-political communities. The second key issue highlighted is the role of the Sikh diaspora in the development of Sikh nationalism and statehood. It critically examines the extent to which diaspora may be regarded as an instrument of ‘long-distance’ nationalism. Third, it argues that the existing literature on Sikh nationalism is remarkably community-centric and needs to engage with theories of nationalism. Finally, while acknowledging the cleavages which fragment the Sikh nation, it concludes that Sikh nationalism has been remarkably cohesive.

A Global and Unified System of Power?

The austerity policies responding to the economic crisis have given rise to questions about the nature of supranational institutions. Are they expressions of cosmopolitan solidarity to small countries’ economic problems, or forms of neocolonialism? Are they representative of an irreversible evolution toward a transnational capitalist unity, or temporary alliances? Questions such as “Who governs in the Americas and in Europe?” are bound to appear more frequently, as antagonism rages between major financial forces striving to reorganize their capital accumulation in a fragmented world market. In this condition, the Leninist analysis of imperialism regains analytical value, in contrast to theories of globalization that have analyzed contemporary capitalism in terms of a unified transnational elite that is no longer attached to the nation-state.

Biogeography of a fragmenting world

editorial ISSN 1948-6596 Biogeography of a fragmenting world Part of the value of biogeography as a multidiscipli- nary transversal science is its wide applicability to processes that occur at multiple scales. One such process is the extinction of species resulting from the disappearance of their habitats. Habitat loss and fragmentation are widespread, and, together with habitat degradation and other human im- pacts, they probably constitute the aspect of global change that contributes the most to current extinc- tion rates (see, e.g., Sandom et al. 2014), although climate change and biological invasions also play significant roles in changing the ecological dynam- ics of species (see the book reviews by Hinsley 2015 and Cassey 2015 in this issue). Island biogeography is particularly useful for understanding the complex effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on biodiversity, for it provides a solid theoretical background to study and model extinction trends (Harris 1984). Using this concep- tual framework, Matthews (2015) studied different aspects of biodiversity variation in habitat frag- ments, finding that trends in these habitat islands are complex and change from one system to an- other, with traditional island biogeographic rela- tionships only being applicable to a very limited extent. Importantly, some of this lack of transfera- bility can be attributed to the effects of non-native species or the characteristics of human disturb- ance, rather than to a lack of generality of the prin- ciples of island biogeography. Further, the nature and extent of habitat degradation in the matrix surrounding the habitat islands turn out to be im- portant in Matthews’ (2015) research, adding a new dimension to island biogeographic enquiry. High-quality datasets such as the one provided by Bergamin et al. (2015) for the vegetation of the highly fragmented Brazilian Atlantic forest will fur- ther enhance our knowledge about the effects of habitat transformation on biodiversity loss. Islands can also contribute to the study of habitat change and extinctions in that they can act as natural experiments, where isolation has result- ed in the existence of many (pseudo)replicates of limited size with similar ecological conditions and similar but, at the same time, independent evolu- tionary processes and species pools. The work of Lavery (2015) on northern Melanesian mammals is a nice example of how the distribution, ecology and evolution of several groups and lineages can be studied from a holistic, multidisciplinary per- spective in archipelagos and island complexes. This integrative perspective is also adopted for the study of particular biomes, such as the South Afri- can Fynbos (Ojeda 2015), but is particularly difficult when these biomes occupy large areas or are locat- ed in areas with considerable biotic interchange. Some of the complexity of continental set- tings can be untangled by studying areas of inter- mediate isolation, such as peninsulas, and explicitly addressing temporal patterns. The combination of data on past (through pollen) and current distribu- tion of species with macroecological and multivari- ate analyses allow Gavin (2015) to study the stabil- ity of habitats in the Olympic Peninsula (Washington, USA) throughout the end of the Pleistocene and the Holocene. At a larger temporal scale, the macroevolutionary study of extinction risk allows understanding of which species may be more prone to extinction, although habitat loss continues to play a major role in determining which species may be finally lost (DeNeve et al. 2015). Here, the important development of statisti- cal tools to analyse temporal and spatial data (Dale & Fortin 2015, Hartig 2015) allows understanding of trends and drivers from multiple sources of da- ta. A multidisciplinary approach, using transversal frameworks and addressing topics of broad inter- est to biogeographers, can perhaps best account for the many facets of the impacts of global change. This major strength of biogeography is nicely encapsulated by the papers within this issue of Frontiers of Biogeography. Joaquin Hortal 1 and Richard Field 2 Frontiers of Biogeography editors-in-chief Departament of Biogeography and Global Change, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC), 28006 Madrid, Spain. jhortal@mncn.csic.es School of Geography, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. richard.field@nottingham.ac.uk frontiers of biogeography 7.2, 2015 — © 2015 the authors; journal compilation © 2015 The International Biogeography Society

Competing Archives, Competing Histories: French and Its Cultural Locations in Late-Medieval England

Thus, around 731 in Northumbria, Bede famously summarizes the language setting of his land. Despite his acknowledgement of the four ethnically linked insular languages and their implicit histories of invasion and conflict, though, Bede aims to draw that fragmented world, by analogy with divine law and Bible study, into a single transcendent and Latin-dominated system, however narrow a population segment may practice it.

Participatory education and challenges in a fragmented world a holistic approach to urban planning for a sustainable future

Accepted: 23.06.2015 In our ‘complex, fragmented urban world’ (Stoker,2000 ) ‘global problems are generated at the local scale and should be solved there too’ (Condon,2008). Yet, neither governments nor citizens take responsibility for the collective problems, while political systems focus on short-term rather than long term benefits. McIntyre-Mills argues, ‘policy and practice needs to consider social, economic and environmental implications for all life’. The field of urban planning exemplifies this. Key issues of democracy and participation in public policy making at local and regional level; the role of the private sector and the balance of markets, government and civil society; and a containerized approach by government results in much urban planning failing to recognize future consequences of current choices. Democracy needs to change to meet the convergent social, economic and environmental challenges. McIntyre-Mills recommends ‘both centralized controls to protect the global commons and decentralized engagement to test out our ideas’. Urban planning also will only succeed if it recognizes that ‘we need to be the subjects not the objects of other people’s designs’ (McIntyre-Mills). However, participatory design is complex and difficult and, while digital communication can potentially include more voices, like any engagement it works best when complementing other processes and ‘built around the needs, goals, and concerns of the potentially engaged,’ (Leinghninger). Sarkissian therefore argues that urban planning needs to take a holistic approach, ‘taking into account multiple layers and components of social systems’ and to be long term focused. This paper explores the means to do that.

From exoticism to diversity: the production of difference in a globalized and fragmented world

Difference is a social construction, and as such it needs a discourse to produce meaning and be socially effective. As a discourse is always socially and historically grounded, so it is the meaning of difference. This article proposes that the difference in the contemporary world is dominantly articulated in the discourse of diversity, as the discourse of exoticism was the dominant discourse of difference in the 19th Century. This proposal will be proved as I show that, as diversity becomes the appreciated discourse in the present, the exoticism loses its value. Stating that, I will try to understand the conditions of existence of each discourse. I will argue that the exoticism was founded in the 19th century upon three fundaments: imperialism, the idea of progress and nation. They provided the condition for a discourse that based the production of difference on the stable separation of an internal and an external space. After examining the fundaments and their relations with the discourse of exoticism, I will show that the production of difference is no longer based on stable notions of internal and external spaces. Currently, difference is produced on the basis of fragmented and globalized social relations, which requires a discourse flexible enough to cope with these material conditions. The discourse of diversity is this discourse.

Future growth patterns of world regions – A GDP scenario approach

Abstract Global GDP projections for the 21st century are needed for the exploration of long-term global environmental problems, in particular climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions as well as climate change mitigation and adaption capacities strongly depend on growth of per capita income. However, long-term economic projections are highly uncertain. This paper provides five new long-term economic scenarios as part of the newly developed shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) which represent a set of widely diverging narratives. A method of GDP scenario building is presented that is based on assumptions about technological progress, and human and physical capital formation as major drivers of long-term GDP per capita growth. The impact of these drivers differs significantly between different shared socio-economic pathways and is traced back to the underlying narratives and the associated population and education scenarios. In a highly fragmented world, technological and knowledge spillovers are low. Hence, the growth impact of technological progress and human capital is comparatively low, and per capita income diverges between world regions. These factors play a much larger role in globalization scenarios, leading to higher economic growth and stronger convergence between world regions. At the global average, per capita GDP is projected to grow annually in a range between 1.0% (SSP3) and 2.8% (SSP5) from 2010 to 2100. While this covers a large portion of variety in future global economic growth projections, plausible lower and higher growth projections may still be conceivable. The GDP projections are put into the context of historic patterns of economic growth (stylized facts), and their sensitivity to key assumptions is explored.

Kinship, Property, and Authority

This article is a step towards a rethinking of the emergence of the modern state in Europe. Traditionally, war has been viewed as the central mechanism of state formation. This approach claims that war caused the emergence of the modern state in two significant ways: 1) by consolidating the politically fragmented world of the middle ages through conquest; and 2) through the pressure of competition in a Darwinian international system, which forced the polities of Europe to create the bureaucratic structures fundamental to the authority of the modern state. This article seeks to undermine the first of these mechanisms by showing that the territorial consolidation of Europe was a logical result of dynastic lordship. I seek to show that the consolidation of territory and authority into fewer and fewer hands was a direct consequence of dynastic successional practices and therefore that the emphasis on coercion in European political development has been overplayed.

Learning in Tomorrow's Classrooms

Teaching today remains the most individualistic of all the professions, with educators characteristically operating in a highly fragmented world of their courses, their skills, and their students. Learning will occur in the classrooms of the future through a sustainable set of complementary capabilities: listening, speaking, writing, connecting, and leading. Relationships, communication, and collaboration will be the dominant themes in tomorrow's hyperconnected classrooms. Viewing and caring about the consequences of another's work will serve as the foundation of mutuality in the classrooms of the future. The most far-reaching question for learners in tomorrow's classrooms will be: How can socially perceptive learners and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any one person, team, or computer?

Meaning in work and emerging work identities of housing support workers: A quest for a comprehensible plot

Work and employees are often marginalized in studies on community-based psychiatric care and support systems. This paper highlights the role of the worker at congregated supported housing for people with severe mental illness (SMI). Housing support workers (HSW) are a fairly new professional role and have developed as a result of major changes in Swedish mental health care and services. The development of new roles is not unproblematic and raises intriguing questions. The purpose of this article is to describe housing support workers' experiences of meaning in their work, and in addition illuminate how the work identity of HSWs can be negotiated and constructed. Four focus group interviews were conducted with a total of 25 participants. Additionally, three follow up sessions were conducted with the same participants. The material consists of employees from four different sites. The intepretation of the material was inspired by a constructionist approach. The analysis generated three themes: to do a good job, everyday needs and the formal role. The work identity for HSWs is complex and not easily interpreted. The experience of an unclear assignment affects the description of what is meaningful and important-the work identity and significant affiliations for HSWs. In the long run, this fragmented world can have negative implications for the HSW.

Fuzzy tales for hard blueprints: the selective coproduction of the Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders, Belgium

Planners become increasingly aware that they operate in a fuzzy, fragmented, volatile, and unpredictable world. For a couple of decennia they have tried to find new answers in a communicative turn, in collaborative or in coproductive planning. However, because of the ongoing fragmentations and complexities, such attempts have shown to be so time-consuming, vague, or framed by the regular suspects of planning that they hardly meet today's major challenges. We will demonstrate this by means of the planning process for the forthcoming Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders, the successor of the Spatial Structure Plan for Flanders—a strategic plan on which the literature has extensively reported. In 1997 this latter plan was endorsed and accepted by most of the authorities concerned. More than fifteen years later, however, original commitments have eroded, and the ongoing process leading to the adoption of the new plan has failed to build broad support and credibility. Therefore, the new Spatial Policy Plan has turned to the promises of coproductive planning in order to include citizens and interest groups in the planning process. However, we will argue that in Flanders today this borrowed methodology of coproductive planning is insufficiently adapted to the Flemish context and is therefore mainly delivering an aura of optimism about sustainability to ongoing policies, while a variety of spatial developments that are recognized as very substantive or problematic are kept outside the process. To overcome this, we will finally discuss a preliminary design of a more contextualized process model, putting the stress on more concrete planning issues, involving independent stakeholders in strategic alliances, and taking a coevolutionary approach from the start.

Linguistic Citizenship as Utopia

major challenge of our time is to build a life of equity in a fragmented world of globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this context, language takes on singular importance as the foremost means whereby we may engage ethically with others across encounters of difference. Howevever, there is an important sense in which the crisis of humanity we are experiencing as a crisis of diversity and voice is deeply entwined with a subterranean crisis of language itself. As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, although language is the foremost realization of our humanity, our current understanding of language distorts rather than elucidates this humanity.

Football: spectacularly insignificant or unspectacularly significant?

Football supporters are often projected as being obsessed, emotionally saturated and intensely involved with their club. This may be true for some, but much of the time, the consumption of football is mundanely incorporated with other routine behaviours and actions. Drawing on previous research on football and everyday life, this paper explores how it is both significant and insignificant through the relationship between spectacular and unspectacular consumption. The ‘everyday’ is used both descriptively and conceptually. The former is illustrated through examples of the ordinary ways in which football becomes entwined with other elements of everyday life. The latter, rooted in the works of everyday life theorists, provides the philosophical tools for contextualizing the meaning of the ‘everyday’. This is then put into perspective with contemporary understandings of living in a fragmented and fluid world which raise further questions about the ordinariness of football culture as part of people’s everyday lives.

English Teachers’ Unions in the Early 21st Century :What Role in a Fragmented World ?

Les NUT (National Union of Teachers), NASUWT (National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers), ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) et Voice sont les principaux syndicats enseignants anglais dans le secteur public. Les NUT et NASUWT ont toujours montre de nombreux signes de militantisme, tandis que les deux autres se sont montres plus moderes. Jusque dans les annees 1970, l’influence de la NUT et de la NASUWT (de la NUT en particulier) est indeniable, mais pas absolue. Situation modifiee par la politique educative mise en place depuis la fin de cette decennie puisque la profession a ete completement transformee, rendant la mission des syndicats enseignants plus difficile encore. Leurs divisions en termes ideologiques et strategiques n’ont fait qu’aggraver de telles difficultes. Ces organisations ont essaye de s’opposer au gouvernement et de collaborer avec lui avec des resultats mitiges, et ce d’autant plus que les NUT, NASUWT, ATL et Voice ont jusqu’ici ete incapables de generer une ideologie alternative propre a faire barrage au discours neo-liberal dominant.

Miradas “noir” de Barcelona: desde Vázquez Montalbán a Mendoza y Riera

Casting contemporary events in an incriminating light, the detective novel genre in Spain pays more attention to the social portrait than to solving the mystery. Manuel Vazquez Montalban and Eduardo Mendoza present their readers with a fragmented world, an incriminating view of the social reality in Barcelona which focuses on the working class, the lack of hope for the youth and the exploitation by the rich and powerful. The first one, obsessed with the dynamics of the urban process, its inner tensions, and the impact of the evolution of capitalism on the historic memory of the lower classes, makes his detective leave town. Mendoza explores the relationship between the human mind and the urban environment, which turns out to be a metaphor for a site or container of power. His detective, a mad “ picaro ”, refuses to follow any norm of conduct, unlike Marlow or Spade. Carme Riera, in her debut in this genre, acknowledges her predecessors, but opts to provide the reader with some new insights. Riera, concerned with today’s lack of moral and social values, breaks with a number of stereotypes, such as locations, the educational system, the youth, the police, or those with some sort of social status.

Autonomy as a Way Out of Crisis?

ABSTRACT In a globalized world, the borders should play a lesser role. The independent states are becoming less and less independent and more dependent on international co-existence, but, paradoxically, the interest for independence is increasing and resulting in a fragmented world. Facing the threat of fragmentation, other forms of living together must be analyzed. Instead of hastily declaring independence, there is a need for an alternative. Autonomy is often seen as too little or too much, depending on if it is viewed by the minority or majority. Some states consider it as just a step toward independence, and therefore unacceptable as an alternative. In this respect, the autonomous statute of the Åland Islands, tailor-made by the League of Nations in 1921, and resulting co-existence with Finland for almost 80 years should be analyzed. In this article, I have tried to describe the co-habitation between Finland and the Åland Islands. Can it serve as an example for settling disputes in other parts of the world, and what are the conclusions we can draw from it?

Social Inequalities Through the Lens of Social Protection: Notes on the Transnational Social Question

AbstractThis concluding article to our special issue places the linkage of social protection and social inequalities in a broader context, namely the transnational social question in Europe and its periphery. The transnational social question pertains to the perception of social inequalities as illegitimate and to their politicisation. In so doing, this article also draws preliminary conclusions, based upon the main findings of the contributions in this special issue, with respect to the social protection strategies utilised by migrants and their significant others, both within and across borders. Transnationality as a marker of heterogeneity is of strategic significance for our understanding of the transnational social question, because it reveals the linkages across the fragmented worlds of social protection. In particular, it provides a window into the social mechanisms that underline social protection across borders and how these mitigate old and generate new social inequalities. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.