Fragmented World Research Articles

Ecumenical Ecclesiology: Unity, Diversity and Otherness in a Fragmented World

Ecumenical Ecclesiology: Unity, Diversity and Otherness in a Fragmented World

The Human Right to Water: Moving Towards Consensus in a Fragmented World

The problem of unmet water and sanitation service needs of one‐sixth to one‐third of humanity has been recognized by the UN General Assembly's 2010 Resolution on the human right to water and sanitation. However, this raises a number of questions. First, does the consensus within the General Assembly imply that all governance actors accept the right and the accompanying responsibilities and does it override other governance discourses dominant in the global arena? Second, why is a human rights discourse superior to other discourses used to address the above problem? Third, what are the challenges in implementing such a discourse and what are the potential solutions? This article argues that although there is growing consensus on the human right to water, the fragmentation of water governance implies that the impact of the consensus is limited. It argues further that there is a real and pressing need to discuss access issues in terms of human rights; but that given the implementation challenges, there is a more active need to move from public–private partnerships to public–non‐governmental organization partnerships.

The narrative nature of place branding

In contrast to most studies and practices of place branding, this article is based on the assumption that branding is not about identifying the essence or DNA of a place, but about constructing powerful narratives that create meanings, which address consumers’ self-fashioning and lifestyle needs according to their specific cultural contexts. Hence, meaning is not immanent in a place or nation. Meaning is constructed by narratives that create order and coherence in an otherwise chaotic and fragmented world.

Mass-customized Target Market Sizing: Extending the Sizing Paradigm for Improved Apparel Fit

We use a conceptual framework of sizing and fit issues to describe an extended paradigm for sizing and fit, which we call mass-customized target market sizing: that is, a sizing system based on and derived from measurement data exclusively from the people who represent an apparel firm's target market. The use of the conceptual framework provides help to expand our thinking to derive innovative solutions for sizing and fit while understanding and addressing all of the issues that must be resolved in creating a new system. Advancing technologies, especially the body scanner, are the tools that make new sizing systems possible through rapid, accurate measurement of populations and development of continuously updated measurement databases that can be sorted by multiple demographic factors. Our central argument for mass-customized target market sizing is that companies that focus on a well-defined target market, that create well designed clothing and sizing systems specifically for this market using anthropometric data, that fit the full range of body types and proportions of this market, that address issues arising from this model regarding design, production and distribution, and that communicate effectively with the market can succeed as a mass-customized business in an increasingly fragmented world. Use of population data, collected and analyzed according to firm-based and consumer-based models, can provide a powerful tool to satisfy target markets and differentiate apparel companies. Target market sizing models can also be expanded to include mass-customized apparel styling models based on the variables proposed within the conceptual framework.

REVIEW ARTICLE: Between Law and Language: When Constitutionalism Goes Plural in a Globalising World

Riding the wave of globalisation, scholars and practitioners envision global governance as a legalised world order. This international rule of law movement is centred on the idea of global constitutionalism. However, the constitutional view of global governance raises fundamental questions pertaining to the nature of international law, the culture of constitutional orders, and the future of global governance: What is the added value for the international legal system to be viewed in constitutional terms? How would comprehensiveness characteristic of traditional constitutional orders figure in an increasingly fragmented world order? Does the new era of constitutionalism herald a paradigm shift in thinking constitutionalism? Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law, and Global Governance, edited by Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Joel P. Trachtman, attempts to illuminate the idea of global constitutionalism. Engaging with the contributors to the collection, this article aims to achieve two goals. In addition to providing a typology of global constitutionalism to help discern the distinct locales where global constitutionalism emerges and dissect its plural meanings, this article argues that global constitutionalism sits at the crossroads of law and language. The ambiguity between legal nomos and narrative language lies at the heart of the current debates surrounding global constitutionalism.

Corruption and Growth in Ethnically Fragmented World

There is increasing recognition that corruption has an adverse influence on growth as it distorts both market economy and democracy. However, the existing literature has failed to address countries' characteristics as far as the process of sample selection is concerned. This paper empirically reexamines the relationship between corruption and growth after dividing the data into two subsamples based on the Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (IEF). Using cross-national evidence, corruption is shown to be an obstacle to growth generally, a conclusion that is in line with the existing literature. Furthermore, a negative association between corruption and growth is found to exist in the subsample of countries with a lower IEF, in ethnically more homogeneous countries. However, there is little evidence that corruption impacts upon growth in the subsample of countries with a relatively higher IEF, in more heterogeneous or diverse countries. This implies that the adverse impact of corruption on growth increases in a country with a relatively low IEF and a strong homogeneity among its constituents, and remains in force so long as attempts to improve transparency are ineffective.

Get your mojo working: complexity’s call for magnetic and magical leaders

In an increasingly fragmented and complex world, the author looks for ways to create greater coherence in the way schools go about their business. This article tracks the progress of a research project over the course of a year to find out what happens when teachers are given the opportunity to have a greater say about the work they do. The author entered the research field with an idea that she hoped would create the dissonance necessary to rethink the organizational systems and reframe them using complexity science as a referent. A form of democratic governance, sociocracy, created the space for emergent leadership, the results of which will continue to evolve over time as the players find new ways of keeping the system healthy, dynamic and moving in the desired direction. This emerging leadership calls for people with ‘magical’ qualities who can work both for themselves and for the organization, both internally and externally.

New Monasticism and the Resurrection of American Christianity

New Monasticism is a growing movement of committed Christians who are recovering the radical discipleship of monasticism and unearthing a fresh expression of Christianity in America. It is not centered in a traditional monastery, but instead its members live radically, settling in abandoned sections of society, committing to community, sharing incomes, serving the poor, and practicing spiritual disciplines. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove shows how this movement is rooted in a long history of monastic renewal, witnessing the power of the gospel to a fragmented world.

Review of Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin

EcopsychologyVol. 1, No. 4 Book ReviewsReview of Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill PlotkinLori PyeLori PyeSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:27 Sep 2010https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2010.0001AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 1Issue 4Dec 2009 InformationCopyright 2009, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:Lori Pye.Review of Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin.Ecopsychology.Dec 2009.206-208.http://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2010.0001Published in Volume: 1 Issue 4: September 27, 2010Online Ahead of Print:February 26, 2010PDF download

A Life in Proverbs: An Interview with Anand Prahlad

A Life in Proverbs:An Interview with Anand Prahlad Michael Kuelker (bio) Anand Prahlad—who was born Dennis W. Folly and today goes simply by Prahlad—is a master teacher of the proverb and of the fields of study with which proverbs are associated, including folklore, poetry, and narrative. The University of Missouri-Columbia English professor is also a poet and musician who integrates these multiple expressions into his teaching. In 2009 he received the Mizzou Alumni Association Faculty Award. My interview with Prahlad took place the morning after he had given two public presentations at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. His topics were "Black Folklore and Survival in the Modern Age" and "Zen, Mojos, Degrees, and Mbiras: Living a Whole Life in a Fragmented World," both of which displayed his scholarly temperament and private self. The dreadlocked professor was on his way home to Columbia, Missouri and we proceeded from Reggae Wisdom, the work of his with which I was most familiar, and then to other topics about his personal and professional life. Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2001, is a study of music and culture from the nexus point of the proverb. No study of Jamaican music has situated the pearl of thought known as the proverb in the context of reggae's ethos and history. Prahlad is also the editor of the three-volume essay anthology The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore (Greenwood, 2006) and the author of a scholarly monograph on proverbs, African American Proverbs in Context (UP of Mississippi, 1996). Since completing the Greenwood encyclopedia, Prahlad has turned to more personal pursuits, writing poetry and a memoir (Getting Happy). In his Dennis Folly days, when he was a member of the Berkeley Poets Co-op collective, he had published Hear My Story and Other Poems (Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press, 1982). In 2008 Prahlad self-produced a CD titled Hover Near, an album of acoustic blues with elements of American folk and Caribbean musical traditions, and he has lately become a skilled practitioner of the mbira, the thumb piano of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. His home site is www.prahladspace.com. MK: How would you explain to the layman the importance of proverbs? Prahlad: Proverbs are important in a lot of ways. One way is because they are very concise, short ways of capturing a lot of philosophical, wise and ideological perspectives that a particular culture has. If you set the proverb "You reap what you sow" in the U. S. South anytime up to the middle of the twentieth century, you would be encapsulating the idea that a single person is going to reap the karma of their individual actions, but you would also be capturing the deeply held sentiment of African Americans in the South that, at some point in time, they would reap the positive benefits of the labor that they had put into the building of the United States and that those people who had enslaved and oppressed them would reap the negative consequences of what they had done. In that single proverb, it says a lot of things. It captures a lot of perspectives that African Americans might have had without saying it in any overt or elaborate way. [End Page 655] Another way that proverbs are important is because they are cultural markers. So if you go to another place, and you use a proverb that is taken from the culture where you come from, it is a way of establishing or asserting a sort of cultural identity in that new context—again in a very short and concise way, without going into elaborate explanations. MK: Your first book in that arena was African American Proverbs in Context, which was followed by Reggae Wisdom. What brought you into the Jamaican landscape? Prahlad: My love for reggae and for Rastafari culture. From the very beginning when I heard reggae, I fell in love with it. And one of the things that captivated me about reggae—and this was the era that is termed "roots reggae"—the way in which the music and the lyrics were designed to...

Le théâtre de Pierre : espace urbain et (inter)textualité dans Pierre, ou les ambiguïtés

This article, which explores the textuality, intertextuality and fictionality of urban space in Melville’s Pierre aims at challenging the apparent opposition between urban and rural spaces in the novel. The hero’s departure from Saddle Meadows does not put an end to his distorted and distorting vision of reality: the urban space Pierre is confronted with is nothing but a new imaginary construct filtered through his readings. The persistence of intertextual references once Pierre moves to the Apostles testifies to his attempt at encoding urban space, but also reveals the growing gap between the hero and the environment he lives in, his perception of the city being that of a fragmented world which turns out to be an illegible text as well as a labyrinthine theatrical space.

The Rise of the Mesopredator

Apex predators have experienced catastrophic declines throughout the world as a result of human persecution and habitat loss. These collapses in top predator populations are commonly associated with dramatic increases in the abundance of smaller predators. Known as “mesopredator release,” this trophic interaction has been recorded across a range of communities and ecosystems. Mesopredator outbreaks often lead to declining prey populations, sometimes destabilizing communities and driving local extinctions. We present an overview of mesopredator release and illustrate how its underlying concepts can be used to improve predator management in an increasingly fragmented world. We also examine shifts in North American carnivore ranges during the past 200 years and show that 60% of mesopredator ranges have expanded, whereas all apex predator ranges have contracted. The need to understand how best to predict and manage mesopredator release is urgent—mesopredator outbreaks are causing high ecological, economic, an...

New Monasticism and the Resurrection of American Christianity

New Monasticism is a growing movement of committed Christians who are recovering the radical discipleship of monasticism and unearthing a fresh expression of Christianity in America. It is not centered in a traditional monastery, but instead its members live radically, settling in abandoned sections of society, committing to community, sharing incomes, serving the poor, and practicing spiritual disciplines. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove shows how this movement is rooted in a long history of monastic renewal, witnessing the power of the gospel to a fragmented world.

Beyond terror and martyrdom: the future of the Middle East

Since 2001, two dominant worldviews have clashed in the global arena: a neoconservative nightmare of an insidious Islamic terrorist threat to civilized life, and a jihadist myth of martyrdom through the slaughter of infidels. Across the airwaves and on the ground, an ill-defined and uncontrollable war has raged between these two opposing scenarios. Deadly images and threats - from the televised beheading of Western hostages to graphic pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, from the destruction wrought by suicide bombers in London and Madrid to civilian deaths at the hands of American occupation forces in Iraq - have polarized populations on both sides of this divide. Yet, as the noted Middle East scholar and commentator Gilles Kepel demonstrates, President Bush's War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East - enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden's call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt - neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.

Advertising Empirical Generalizations: Implications for Research and Action

ABSTRACT A special conference on empirical generalizations (EGs) in advertising led to this special issue of the Journal of Advertising Research. It also generated a representative selection of 23 EGs that give a sense of how strong our scientific knowledge is about advertising, and where the gaps lie. While real advances in knowledge have been achieved, the list highlights significant knowledge gaps, particularly concerning advertising in the new fragmented interactive-media world. We surveyed advertising thought leaders on which of these empirical laws they felt were most important and most certain. Many of our empirical laws suffer from inadequate knowledge concerning the conditions over which they do and do not generalize.

Always Being Reformed: Faith for a Fragmented World – By Shirley C. Guthrie

Always Being Reformed: Faith for a Fragmented World – By Shirley C. Guthrie

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds

w > w 2 w P H < W H Q O which Eugene himself committed to forestallbeing inevitablyabandoned by her, too. In true postmodern fash ion, then, the novel ends metalepti callywith the madman seeking him self?a synecdoche for the insanely fragmented lives themodern world forces us all to live. ChristinaDokou Universityof Athens Verse LindaBierds.Flight:New and Selected Poems. New York. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 2008. x + 212 pages. $24.95. isbn978 0-399-15525-3 When Henry James urged a young writer to become "one of those on whom nothing is lost," he could have been describing Linda Bierds, whose precise, almost microscopic eye conveys images of uncanny, crystalline accuracy. She can pick out the "lacework of gull prints" on thedeck rail of a ship or, in a Victo rian photograph, "a glaze of amber earwax, / a leafof tobacco like ash on the beard." Bierds probes the fields of sensation until she pierces the illusion that any experience is too far away to see or understand. Bierds's latestbook, Flight:New and Selected Poems, surveys her seven previous collections and includes fifteen new poems, showcasing Bierds's distinctive poetic voice. Emerging with a mature style in 1988with The Stillness, the Dancing, and continuing through a distin guished career marked by a MacAr thur "genius" grant and many other awards, Bierds has remained faithful to her central themes, while each collection expands the range of her subject matter. That range is breathtaking. From prehistoric time to contem porary space travel, from theplains of Nebraska to Venetian canals, these poems bring to life a con stellation of exotic worlds. She not only describes, for example, an eighteenth-century wig form, but the "neck-shaped ring" of talc left behind when a boy picks itup. The stars, seen by an astronaut in deep space, lose their celestial glamour as they float "matte as wax pears." To discover a poem by Bierds is to enter an imagined world palpable with convincing detail thatconveys deep emotional and metaphorical resonance. Littlewonder, then, thatmany of Bierds's poems portray the elu sive rewards of observation itself. The series "Six in All," for example, tracks the fate ofMatthew Brady's photographic plates, some ofwhich end up as window panes in a green house, where his ghostly images tremble against the sky. She writes about such scientists as Van Leeu wenhoek, Marie Curie, and Gregor Mendel as well as visual artists? Rembrandt, Chagall, D?rer, and oth ers?for whom precise observation leads to aesthetic vision. Moments ofphysical duress and shattering violence occur frequently in her poetry, but within sight of death, Bierds will often include an image of enclosure. In "The Stillness, theDancing," Bierds introduces the remarkable image of a Neolithic skeleton of a woman who died in childbirth, the infant's skeleton still held in the "paddle and stem" of the mother's hips. Later, in "Mid-Plains Tornado," Bierds describes a mare whose six-week-old foal is embed ded in her side by a tornado, "her great folds of shining skin, / closed over the skull." Linda Bierds's new poems are dialogic, as in "Fragments from Ven ice," an epistolary exchange between Albrecht D?rer and a patron, and "Salvage/' a poem about an air plane crash, inwhich thevoice of a questioner alternates with the voice of a survivor, creating a haunting evocation of terror. As the ques tioner probes for the exact details of the survivor's experience, Bierds shows thatnaming the terrible with unflinching accuracy is an act of the highest intelligenceand courage. Mary Kaiser Jefferson StateCommunityCollege Ruxandra Cesereanu. Crusader Woman. Adam J. Sorkin with the author et al., tr. Boston. Black Widow. 2008. 124 pages. $18.95. isbn 978-0 9795137-5-6 While Ruxandra Cesereanu's "Only in despair can we keep and witness reality" seems to characterize?if not define?her poetic vision, the beginning and concluding poems of this collection, "Letter to American Poets" and the title poem, move beyond thewrenching, self-rending language of earlier poems like those in Lunacies (seeWLT, January 2005, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiim 72 1 World Literature Today ^^^H ...

Omar sells: American advertisements based on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, c.1910–1920

During the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when modern advertising grew in response to a burgeoning consumer culture, American stores displayed products tied to the name of Omar Khayyám. Motivated by Omariana, the intense response to the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that contributed to an outpouring of illustrated editions, literary parodies, musical scores and dramatic productions, advertisers found a market ripe for Omar‐related consumables and ephemera. While typically discussed among other Oriental‐themed advertising schemes of the time, Omar products were unique in their attachment to a single text. Omar ads responded to the cultural phenomenon of Omariana by relying on the public’s familiarity with the text itself and contributing to the popular persona that had already formed around the imagined Omar. Two case studies – Maxfield Parrish’s design for Crane’s chocolates and the marketing of American Tobacco’s Omar cigarettes – investigate how these products appealed to consumers through both visual and literary connections with the Rubáiyát that tapped into popular perceptions about the author and his philosophy. Advertisers of these products drew on themes presented in the text, including Khayyám’s prescription to live in the moment and his penchant for worldly pleasures, and connected them to the public’s own desire for gratification and escape from their workaday lives. Both companies smartly included free gifts with the purchase of their Omar‐related products, from keepsake boxes, to posters, to popular fiction – fueling the desire for Omar ephemera and thus perpetuating the craze. Collecting and consuming Omar products contributed to a sense of group affiliation; Omar fans were participants – even comrades – in a uniquely modern cultural experience. These products responded to society’s search for harmony and a sense of community in an increasingly fragmented world.

Belinda Bennett. Health Law's Kaleidoscope: Health Law Rights in a Global Age

In early 2008, protestors wearing animal masks gathered outside the UK's parliament to demonstrate against the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos for use in research (Brown, 2008). This protest could be taken as a prime illustration of the issues Belinda Bennett tackles in her book Health Law's Kaleidoscope. Bennett describes a fragmented world struggling to cope with rapidly accelerating scientific powers. She describes—citing Giddens and Beck (Bennett, 2008: 116)—an unprecedented escalation of public anxiety over the risks associated with technological innovations. On the whole, Bennett's discussion is insightful and stimulating. Occasionally she draws on slightly clichéd rhetoric that can be hard to avoid in this context. She suggests that we are hurtling towards a new and extraordinary technological future and that this is something so profound and transformational that it has awoken equally profound and unprecedented fears (Bennett, 2008: 113). This language of exceptionalism and novelty does not always capture the ways in which current fears may mirror those of the past. The animal masks of 2008 call to mind James Gillray's 1802 cartoon showing hapless patients sprouting cows’ heads after inoculation with Edward Jenner's newly developed smallpox vaccine (Glynn, 2004: 110). Technological innovation has always stimulated social upheaval, as Bennett herself concedes elsewhere.