International Gathering Research Articles

Philip Humphrey Thomas (16 June 1926 – 14 January 2014)

Philip Humphrey Thomas (16 June 1926 – 14 January 2014)

CUISINE, CULTURE, AND POLITICS IN RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE: THE FOOD FOR THOUGHT SYMPOSIUM

ПИЩА ДЛЯ РАЗМЫШЛЕНИЙ The Symposium ―Food for Thought: Culture and Cuisine in Russia & Eastern Europe, 1800–Present‖ was held at the University of Texas at Austin on February 7 and 8, 2014. Mary Neuburger, Tatiana Kuzmic, and Keith Livers, all of UT Austin, organized this event with support from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and other local sponsors. With more than fifty presenters, ―Food for Thought‖ represents the largest conference on Russian, East European, and Eurasian food studies ever held in the United States. This event brought together scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, literature, and geography, with culinary professionals engaged in promoting and researching these regions’ foodways. This was a truly international gathering. ―Food for Thought‖ hosted participants from the United States, Canada, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Dr. Ronald LeBlanc, Professor of Russian and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire, gave the keynote address, ―From Russian Vegetarians to Soviet Hamburgers: Tolstoy, Pilnyak, and the Ethics/Politics of Diet.‖ This included material from Dr. LeBlanc’s previous monograph,

The Geographies of Knowledge Transfers over Distance: Toward a Typology

In the globalizing knowledge economy firms have become less reliant on local production and market networks and increasingly expand their reach to an international or global scale. The argument of this paper suggests that this has given rise to distinct geographies of knowledge transfers over distance, which rely on periodic or regular temporary face-to-face contacts. While some of these settings of temporary knowledge transfers have existed for a long time, they are now being intensively applied throughout the economy. In this paper we develop a typology of these geographies based on three dimensions that characterize the conditions for knowledge exchange: (i) framing, (ii) cognitive focus and goals, and (iii) trust and risks involved. Based on these variables, we identify three configurations and eight subcategories of knowledge transfers that build upon temporary face-to-face interaction, classified as (1) international community gatherings, (2) international business travel, and (3) transnational network relations. Systematic comparison reveals that with growing uncertainty in economic interaction and with increasing commitment between the agents, trust-based linkages tend to become more important, and the number of interacting agents declines, while the frequency of temporary face-to-face meetings increases.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck Returning to be guest editors of this journal for a short period of time, we are delighted to present such a rich 2014 issue. In April 2013, Union Theological Seminary in New York City welcomed a distinguished international group of scholars, theologians, and other commentators to a gathering of engaged Buddhists and Christian liberation theologians. Those of us who attended were invited for a conference that also celebrated the career and retirement of Paul Knitter, of the Union Seminary faculty and one of the great voices for Buddhist-Christian interchange in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We were delighted when Paul took up a suggestion from Sallie King, the conference keynote speaker, that this journal publish some of the papers from that conference. Paul agreed and quickly expedited Sallie’s suggestion, clearing the way for this journal to publish the comments found in these pages. We are grateful to Sallie, Paul, and everyone else who made this a smooth and easy transition into our guest editorship. They made possible a wonderful issue. The conference itself, which Rita attended as one of the invited speakers, was a wonderful celebration of collegiality and friendship across continents, religions, generations, disciplines, and social concerns, as the table of contents for this issue will quickly demonstrate. Friendship and collegiality were enhanced by the fact that participants lived together in guest rooms at Union Seminary and ate together there, dining on a variety of ethnic cuisines. In addition to many distinguished speakers, only some of whom are represented in these pages, the event featured music, dance, liturgy, and meditation from a wide variety of religious and cultural traditions. The print medium of this journal cannot begin to capture all the richness provided by this conference. Nevertheless, we are delighted to bring some flavor of the conference to you through the papers selected for this issue of the journal. This conference also demonstrated what many would regard as a significant advance in what Buddhist-Christian interchange involves from standard fare in the earlier days of that encounter. Some will remember that this journal, founded by David Chappell in 1980, grew directly out of one of the first large English-language international gatherings dedicated to Buddhist-Christian interchange, which took place in Hawai’i and was also organized by David Chappell. That first issue of this journal published some papers from that early conference, including Rita’s. That paper was one of the very earliest statements on feminism and Buddhism, but papers dedicated to joint pursuit of solutions to large-scale social problems were much less [End Page vii] in evidence in those early years. The field has grown, such that subdisciplines within Buddhist-Christian interchange are now commonplace and no one is surprised that we can easily dedicate a whole issue of this journal simply to Engaged Buddhism and Christian liberation theology. We also take pride in the fact that both that very first issue and this issue, as well as many issues in between, contain articles and essays on gender and feminism. We take pride in this fact because even engaged Buddhists and Christian liberation theologians often forget that sexism in its many varieties, including heteronormativity, ranks very high among the causes of human misery. In addition, the conference and contributors to this issue took on issues of economic injustice, racism, and environmental degradation. Others spoke directly out of and about the experiences of those who suffer from those types of injustice. Theological and spiritual responses to those injustices are also presented. Conference organizer and newly minted PhD Kyeongil Jung and keynote speaker Sallie King present overviews of the conference itself and of interchanges between engaged Buddhists and Christian liberation theologians. Honoree Paul Knitter closed the conference with a moving tribute to his many friends in the worlds of engaged Buddhism and Christian liberation theology and an account of what he has learned from them over the many years we have all worked together. This set of conference papers is followed by a varied collection of book reviews and the News and Views section, thanks to Sid Brown, book review editor, and Jonathan Seitz...

A tribute to Professor Peter Martins Ndumbe

I was among the hundreds of people who attended the burial ceremony of Professor Peter Martins Ndumbe on July 6, 2013, in his native Ofrikpabi village in the southwest region of Cameroon. Professor Ndumbe died on May 14 in South Africa after a long illness. He was a fi ne scientist of exceptional rigour and self-discipline, virtues which propelled him to the pinnacle of scientific distinction as a professor of medicine, an infectious disease and public health specialist, and a research microbiologist and virologist. As Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Yaounde I, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Buea in Cameroon, and most recently as programme manager (research, publications, and library services) at WHO’s Regional Offi ce for Africa in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, Professor Ndumbe has left an enduring legacy of landmark contributions in the fi ght against diseases of poverty in Africa. Peter Ndumbe was a member of several national and international professional and academic societies. He was a member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of UNICEF, the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, and the WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. He was a founding member and chair of the Task Force on Immunisation for the African Region since 2004, with the responsibility to seek out new vaccines against tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV. I fi rst met Peter in 1991 through my mentor Professor Jonathan Mann at Harvard University. We then met again during several international gatherings including the meetings of the alumni of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and later in 2004 as a junior colleague during his tenure as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Yaounde I. Needless to say that, as with many of the people he mentored, he was instrumental in my direct appointment as a senior lecturer in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, and later to the rank of professor. Peter was a doctor who genuinely cared for and listened to the needs of vulnerable patients, particularly women and children in Africa. There is no doubt that Africa has lost one of its intellectual giants. Peter is survived by two children, many family members, and hordes of friends in the world of science, medicine, and academia who will mourn him.

Launching the 18th Scientific Congress of Asian Pacific Endodontic Confederation (APEC) and 4th Jordanian Endodontic Conference in ESE, Lisbon

Dearest APEC members, Greetings! I am back again to Amman after attending the 16th Biennial Congress of the European Society of Endodontology (ESE) that was held in Lisbon, Portugal, with huge participation exceeding 2000 dentists representing more than 70 countries from all over the world. Our booth in the exhibition venue to launch the Asian Pacific Endodontic Confederation (APEC) Amman 2015 Conference worked during the 3 days of the Congress (Fig. 1). More than 1000 flyers of the first announcement were distributed to the attendees in addition to other advertising material and Jordanian dates provided by the Jordan Tourism Board through their office in Madrid (Fig. 2). I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organising committee of the ESE Lisbon Conference for their support to APEC and congratulate them on this successful event. The esteemed official support to Amman APEC Conference gained by the government, the Jordanian Dental Association and the Jordanian Endodontic Society (JES) reflects the great interest and desire in Jordan to make this event special and different. I was also promised full support by sponsoring companies, pronounced speakers and dentists from well-known and prestigious universities as a result of formal personal contacts to invite them to our upcoming event that will form a Pan Arab and international gathering. Back to Amman, our preparations in JES will speed up to finalise the PDF file of the 4th Jordanian and 18th APEC Conference that will include more detailed information to be distributed to all APEC members and friends in due time. Before and during Amman conference, APEC family members will witness new initiatives that will materialise the goals, vision and decisions of previous Biennial General Meetings and will constitute a turning point to be added to the bright and rich history of our organisation and glory of the event. Aspired by the history and constitution of our organisation and the support of all APEC family members, we will move forward to compete in raising the

Stochastic methods in reliability and risk management

This volume focuses on stochastic methods developed for reliability modeling and risk analysis. Reliability theory and risk analysis have been closely related, and stochastic methods that are commonly used in both fields serve as a natural conduit through which useful concepts and best practices can migrate from one field to the other. This special volume highlights this convergence of reliability modeling and risk analysis, that forms the core of the science of analyzing hazards and its applications to various fields. Most of papers appearing in this volume were selected from the presentations given at the 7th International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability (MMR2011), held in Beijing, China, June 20–24, 2011. The conference was co-chaired by Yiming Wei (Beijing Institute of Technology, China), N. Balakrishnan (McMaster, Canada), and N. Limnios (UTC, France). The papers have been significantly extended from the conference presentations and all papers have been refereed according to the standards of Annals of Operations Research. The MMR2011 is the seventh in a series of international conferences on Mathematical Methods in Reliability. Since 1997, when the first of MMR conferences was held in Bucharest, Romania, the MMR has become a major international gathering of researchers from the international reliability community. The MMR conferences intend to serve as a forum for discussing fundamental issues and recent advances in reliability theory and risk analysis methods, as well as their applications, and have attracted an increasing number of participants from every continent in the world. The Beijing conference focused on all aspects

The Global Christian Forum, A Narrative History: ‘Limuru, Manado and Onwards’

The Global Christian Forum’s international gathering in Limuru, Kenya, in 2007, affirmed the value of this initiative for promoting relationships between Christian traditions with little if any mutual encounter. With this fresh mandate, the Forum organized further regional meetings and extended its methodology into other contexts. Following a second global gathering at Manado, Indonesia, in 2011, it continues to develop its activities. Though its minimal structures and staffing bring challenges, it still aims to deliver what has been described as ‘the best value-for-money ecumenism in the world,’ acting in the service of, and in collaboration with, churches and ecclesial bodies.

“MAYBE YOU NEED TO HAVE AN EARTHQUAKE”

This study explores whether the US media, particularly television, radio, and newspapers, met the expectations of international journalism educators concerning the coverage of world news. Four focus groups with 34 journalism educators from 29 countries were conducted in the United States. A critical discourse analysis shows that most journalism educators' expectations were not met because they found world news coverage to be deviant from the reality in their respective countries or regions. Discussion focuses on how the discourse could help us to understand how to coalesce international journalistic practices and information gathering in a new global hi-tech era, not only for the US media, but for other media systems around the world.

The Founding of the International Neuro-Ophthalmology Society

The Founding of the International Neuro-Ophthalmology Society

The Gatherings of the Elders: The Beginnings of a Pagan International

Since 2003, the International Council for Cultural Studies has organized a five-day “International Conference and Gathering of Elders of Ancient Traditions and Cultures” every third year. Participants include spokesmen of the Maori, Yoruba, Maya, Lakota, etc. religions, as well as neo-Druids, Romuva Lithuanians, etc. Each of the conferences took place in India, with the main organizational input and sponsoring provided by the ICCS’s American chapter. The sources of inspiration for what started as a Hindu outreach to the world’s other remaining or reviving Pagans are several, but can be traced to Hindu philosopher Ram Swarup (1920- 1998). His critiques of Christianity and Islam and particularly his defence of polytheism conclude with an appeal to global Pagan solidarity and networking. The triannual Gathering of Elders has become the Pagan International that he hoped for: genuinely global, rooted in genuine religions and with a positive message.

SP0038 Chronic nonbacterial osteomyelitis

Chronic nonbacterial osteomyelitis CNO is an inflammatory disorder of the musculoskeletal system with yet unknown etiology. In addition to bone inflammation, patients may present with inflammation of other tissues including...

Potential for the International Spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Association with Mass Gatherings in Saudi Arabia

Background: A novel coronavirus (MERS-CoV) causing severe, life-threatening respiratory disease has emerged in the Middle East at a time when two international mass gatherings in Saudi Arabia are imminent. While MERS-CoV has already spread to and within other countries, these mass gatherings could further amplify and/or accelerate its international dissemination, especially since the origins and geographic source of the virus remain poorly understood. Methods: We analyzed 2012 worldwide flight itinerary data and historic Hajj pilgrim data to predict population movements out of Saudi Arabia and the broader Middle East to help cities and countries assess their potential for MERS-CoV importation. We compared the magnitude of travel to countries with their World Bank economic status and per capita healthcare expenditures as surrogate markers of their capacity for timely detection of imported MERS-CoV and their ability to mount an effective public health response. Results: 16.8 million travelers flew on commercial flights out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates between June and November 2012, of which 51.6% were destined for India (16.3%), Egypt (10.4%), Pakistan (7.8%), the United Kingdom (4.3%), Kuwait (3.6%), Bangladesh (3.1%), Iran (3.1%) and Bahrain (2.9%). Among the 1.74 million foreign pilgrims who performed the Hajj last year, an estimated 65.1% originated from low and lower-middle income countries. Conclusion: MERS-CoV is an emerging pathogen with pandemic potential with its apparent epicenter in Saudi Arabia, where millions of pilgrims will imminently congregate for two international mass gatherings. Understanding global population movements out of the Middle East through the end of this year's Hajj could help direct anticipatory MERS-CoV surveillance and public health preparedness to mitigate its potential global health and economic impacts.

Arrested in St Peter's

ABSTRACTThis article concerns the protest of an Aboriginal Australian man, Anthony Martin Fernando, who during an international gathering of Rome Catholics in the Jubilee year of 1925 handed out flyers outside St Peter's Cathedral in Rome. By protesting against conditions for Aboriginal people in Australia, Fernando brought the question of settler colonialism in Australia directly and in person to the Roman Catholic community arriving from around the world. Where the Vatican's ethnographic exhibition of that year rehearsed the more usual representation of injustices towards Australia's indigenous people as integral to an unruly nineteenth-century colonial frontier, Fernando aimed to link Australian settler colonialism with the British world in the present – a world he characterized as yet to be brought to account for its actions towards colonized peoples, particularly the Aborigines of Australia. The audacity of that protest, as well as the literal presence of an Aboriginal man living by himself on the streets of interwar Europe, forces us to reconsider Aboriginal Australian activism in the twentieth century. It requires firstly a more genuinely transnational account of the history of indigenous politics in Australia, and secondly a more dynamic account of the diversity of often-ephemeral forms of black political activism carried out within and beyond colonial settings in the modern era.

Guest Editorial Note: Human Rights, Global Conferences, and the Making of Postwar Transnational Feminisms

Guest Editorial Note:Human Rights, Global Conferences, and the Making of Postwar Transnational Feminisms Jean H. Quataert and Benita Roth, Special Issue Co-editors This note introduces our special issue on "Human Rights, Global Conferences, and the Making of Postwar Transnational Feminisms." In it we try to capture part of the contentious histories of feminist activism unfolding in the period after World War II. We focus specifically on the meanings for feminist thought and action worldwide of the UN sponsored world conferences on women and related international gatherings. Prodded by international and national women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and facilitated through the UN's Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the United Nations General Assembly declared 1975 "International Women's Year" (IWY) and named 1975-1985 as the "Decade for Women." The UN sponsored three large international conferences beginning with Mexico City (1975), followed by Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985); these gatherings generated so much momentum that a Fourth Women's World Conference was held in Beijing in 1995. Other UN conferences, including the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa in September 2001, also featured in this issue, allowed feminist antiracist activists around the globe to come together to discuss understandings of the intersections of gender and racial oppression.1 These conferences took place against the backdrop of a number of formative geopolitical developments: Cold War tensions and their subsequent easing after 1989; decolonization struggles and emerging nations' insistent drive for equitable economic development amid the continuing inequalities of the global economic and political order; the rise of neo-liberal economic agendas; women's increased participation globally in the formal labor sector; transnational organizing for lesbian and gay rights; and a concomitant, significant rise by the mid-1990s of conservative religious and fundamentalist groups around the world. These geopolitical and cultural factors sometimes sustained and sometimes constrained the ability of diverse feminist [End Page 11] and women's activists to form alliances, set new international and national agendas, and see to their implementation on the ground. Until very recently, much of what has appeared about the UN conferences in journal literature has been in the form of reports on participants' experiences nearly exclusively in women's studies journals.2 Since 1996, it has mainly been feminist sociologists and political scientists charting the effects of the UN conferences on feminist and women's organizing around the globe.3 There also is a vibrant literature assessing the impact of women's [End Page 12] world conferences on feminist contributions to development discourses, particularly those efforts challenging the neo-liberal assumptions that drive the giving of mainstream development aid. These debates stress ongoing unequal macro-economic contexts.4 [End Page 13] The topic of the UN meetings, with a few exceptions, has been left largely unexamined in women's history despite its undeniable importance for shaping the vibrant new patterns of transnational advocacy networks that emerged during the Decade.5 The same time frame saw a huge growth of feminist NGOs worldwide; the invention of innovative gatherings like the World Social Forums, which feature impressive participation by feminist activists; and the creation of UN People's Forums, which gave voice and visibility to NGOs as well as to local leaders and activists generally marginal to governmental authority and power. Strikingly, however, the Journal of Women's History paid scant scholarly attention to these conferences. One short report by Peggy Simpson, "Beijing in Perspective," appeared in the Spring 1996 issue; Simpson was an acclaimed Associated Press journalist whose personal experiences are part of the larger narrative presented here. In 1997, the JWH published Wang Zheng's article "Maoism, Feminism, and the UN Conference on Women: Women's Studies Research in Contemporary China."6 The relative neglect by historians of the more recent interface of global and local feminist organizing lies, perhaps, in the challenges for historical research of engaging contemporary themes and issues. The growing interest among women's historians in human rights histories and comparative studies in women's movements thus reflects a major conceptual shift, which promises a turn to transnational methodologies, interregional connections, and global historical perspectives. As we hope to show through the articles in...

DOP Conference 9–11 January 2013: Connecting and contributing to make a difference

The January 2012 DOP conference was the second largest conference within the Society. Nearly 500 occupational psychologists were treated to a hugely successful conference that provided intellectual and practical benefits within an atmosphere that was warm, positive and inclusive throughout. It felt more like a family event than an international gathering. We partly attribute this to careful planning, good organisation and a great location coupled with the integration of what were previously two parallel conference events, but these aspects just released the naturalqualities of the delegates. Enquiring minds with a strong people focus placed in asupportive context brought out the very best in each other.Conference is a gathering of like-minded professionals that greatly helps to raise our profile and influence as a profession both in the academic and in the world of organisations as exemplified by the extensive media coverage we had from the 2012 event.For January 2013 we return to the excellent venue of Crowne Plaza in Chester and eagerly anticipate an even more successful event and record delegate numbers.

Systems Thinking: Common Ground or Untapped Territory?

At international gatherings of systems scholars, the term ‘systems thinking’ elicits understanding nods and smiles. Such thinking, it would appear, is a way this largely academic community works ‘all together now’, thinking in a systemic way about our varied areas of inquiry. But how common is this understanding among us? Assessing the degree to which we work ‘all together now’ requires recognizing the different assumptions we make about what systems thinking means. So powerful is systems thinking's capacity to holistically address twenty‐first‐century problems that much has been written about it for laypeople. This article presents a content analysis of 14 popular books on systems thinking, revealing that ISSS members’ understanding nods and smiles belie a plurality of meanings assigned to systems thinking and claims about what it means to be a systems thinker. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Beyond the Network? Occupy London and the Global Movement

This article argues that paying attention to the spatialities of the Occupy movement, and in particular the role of territory, suggests that the dominant metaphor of the network may be insufficient to understanding the diverse spatial strategies of contemporary social movements. The aim of presenting this argument is both to be provocative and also to take seriously the Occupy movement's ‘politics of asking’, not shying away from asking challenging questions. It starts by introducing the reader to the Occupy London movement and its autonomous tendencies of non-hierarchical organisation and do it yourself politics. It then places Occupy London within the wider movement and compares it to the alter-globalisation movement, a similar example of a global movement for socio-economic justice. It is argued that understanding the autonomous politics of the alter-globalisation movement through the logic of networking is not only useful but also limiting in its potentials for conceptualising non-hierarchical organising. The remainder of the essay considers how Occupy may be moving beyond the network as a dominant organisational form and political goal. Specifically, it draws on the author's experiences at international gatherings and in the international commission working group of Occupy London and argues that there has been a renewed attention to territory and territoriality. This does not imply that networked spatialities of activism have become less important but raises questions over the centrality of networked thinking to contemporary understandings of global movements. By way of conclusion, this articles poses questions for activists and academics interested in Occupy.

Capital Crimes: John Thelwall, ‘Gallucide’ and Psychobiography

It is no longer an outlandishly jacobin critical move to cite Wordsworth and Coleridge as a context for a reading of John Thelwall. For too long a political caricature and mere anecdote in the narrative of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s youthful radicalism, Thelwall is now recognised not only as one of the most impressive thinkers and voices of the 1790s reform movement and as a pioneering speech therapist in his ‘second life’, but also as a paradigmatic Romantic author whose enfranchising experimentation with a variety of genres forged a new kind of literary-political discourse. The probing collection of essays on this ‘radical Romantic and acquitted felon’ edited by Steve Poole (2009), the issue of this journal (16, 2; July 2010) devoted to Thelwall, and the founding of The John Thelwall Society on 4 January 2012 at an international gathering in Oxford are only the most recent interventions in a dynamic, burgeoning field. Critics have been drawn in particular to Thelwall’s jacobin allegories, satires and fables of the 1790s, the most politically eventful time of his career. These allegories, whose strategies of indirection mark the pressures of anti-jacobin regulation, have appealed to Romanticists owing to what Michael Scrivener calls their ‘characteristically allusive and semantically elusive’ methods. As sites of ‘print-culture incursion into popular oral culture’, Thelwall’s fables became ‘object[s] of contestation over legally permissible political expression’.

Le Giornate Mondiali della Gioventù – i giovani e il beato Giovanni Paolo II

Many people say that World Youth Day is Pope John Paul II’s best invention. However, he used to say that it was the young people themselves who invented it. The Pope felt that the Church’s concern for the younger generations should be made known. He issued invitation to young people to come to Rome for Palm Sunday. After two gatherings, at the end of 1985 he announced the institution of the World Youth Day that was to be celebrated every year in the dioceses. The diocesan celebrations were soon joined by international gatherings. The author of this article presents World Youth Day as the Church’s Day for youth and with youth. This idea is not an alternative to ordinary youth ministry, often carried out with great sacrifice and self-denial. Indeed it intends actually to consolidate this work by offering new encouragement for commitment, objectives which foster ever greater involvement and participation. By aiming to foster greater fervour in apostolate among young people, the Church desires to make them the protagonists of an apostolate which will spread to the other ages and situations of life in the ambit of new evangelization.