Renewable Era Research Articles

From “special relationship” to “strategic partnership”: prospects for renewal of Canada-CARICOM relations in a polarizing global political economy

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the prospect for a renewed era of bilateral cooperation amongst Canada and the Caribbean Community. It argues that ongoing efforts to operationalize the Canada-CARICOM Strategic Partnership entail promising preliminary signs, but that substantive renewal requires a new mutual fidelity encompassing credible commitments toward a more equitable political profit-sharing arrangement. For Canada’s part, these include enhancing domestic market access for key CARICOM exporters, explicit recognition of vulnerable CARICOM business sectors, effective legal protections for temporary foreign workers, and a new juridical approach toward naturalized legal offenders. For CARICOM, credibility entails renewed efforts at integrating member-state firms into Canadian value chains alongside a new collective vision for regional development. En lieu of such commitments the new strategic partnership seems destined to perpetuate an increasingly listless bilateral continuum.

Rejecting the Radical New Left: Transformations in Japanese Social Movements

After a disastrous period of New Left political violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by two decades of abeyance, Japan has experienced a renewed era of social movement activity since the 1990s. These new movements explicitly seek to avoid contamination by the earlier period, even when their participants know little about it except for fear perpetuated by media portrayals of senseless violence. We analyze ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups engaged in collective action, ranging from small informal groups in Japan’s invisible civil society; groups trying to mobilize laborers who fall outside Japan’s traditional enterprise unions; and groups reviving and revitalizing older movement networks to deal with new threats; to new right-wing challengers and their counter-movements; and those making innovative use of cultural resources. They all seek alternatives to earlier social movements that engaged in political violence, by creating very different organizational structures and relations to ideology, relying on social media for communication, and developing new forms of collective action. They foreground cultural and expressive repertoires, and seek to establish the movement as a place of personal and social belonging. As was true of the New Left social movements in the mid-20th century, these new groups are closely attuned to movement developments around the world, even as they craft their responses to specific historical conditions in Japan.

Security and political relations between Russia and Afghanistan (with threats and challenges)

The relationship between Afghanistan and Russia has seen many ups and downs. Seizing control from the Taliban in Afghanistan is viewed as the initiation of a renewed era in Russian-Afghan relations following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although the Russians have no desire to get involved in the issue of Afghanistan, but the expansion of the Taliban's influence in this country and the establishment of a relationship between this group and the Islamists of Central Asia and the North Caucasus, they have to pay for it. With the incident of September 11, 2001, Russia tried to improve its international status by asking for an opportunity and announcing its readiness to fight terrorism together with America. Regardless of the results of this effort, the Russians could not gain much status and benefits in Afghanistan. This article seeks to answer the question of what place Afghanistan has in the security policy of the Russian Federation. In this regard, the hypothesis was proposed that Afghanistan is very significant for the Russian Federation from a security point of view, because the threats arising from it have threatened Russia's security and interests in various dimensions. This article is done with an explanatory approach to examine and study the topic of the article, and the required data has been collected from library, electronic and interview sources.

Visualization study on double-diffusive convection during a rollover in liquid energy storage tanks

The growing global energy consumption and the transition to the renewable era highlight the urgent need for safe and energy-efficient liquid energy storage tanks. Rollover has been a severe hazard to the efficiency and safety of the storage tank accompanied by significantly enhanced mass and heat transport across the stratified layers, and rapid evaporation and mixing of the layers happen. However there is a lack of experiments sophistically designed for cryogenic storage applications, which leads to a lack of visualized and quantitative experimental data to understand the physics of rollover in energy storage tanks. In this study, a Z-type Schlieren system is established to visually reveal the double-diffusive convection patterns in a cylindrical experimental chamber. The concentrations of salt-water solutions are adjusted to simulate the density difference between the multi-component cryogenic fluids. Cross-correlation algorithm is adopted to analyze the transient velocity distributions in the stratified system. The rollover process is divided into four stages, namely the initial, transition, mixing, and stable stages. Effects of heat flux, concentration difference, and heating location on the rollover characteristics are parametrically investigated. Correlations are proposed with rescaled buoyancy ratio and density gradient, and satisfactory agreement with experimental data is achieved.

Dynamic Parameter Simulations for a Novel Small-Scale Power-to-Ammonia Concept

Ammonia is a promising carbon-free energy vector, hydrogen carrier, and efficient means for long-time hydrogen storage. Power-to-ammonia-to-power concepts, powered exclusively by electricity from renewable sources, will leave the carbon economy behind and enter a truly renewable era. However, the fluctuating nature of renewables requires a good dynamic behavior of such concepts. Employing the software Aspen Plus Dynamics®, this paper investigates the dynamic behavior of a novel containerized power-to-ammonia solution to be tested at the University of Genova in 2023. Implementing a novel kinetic reaction model, the impacts of several deviations from the optimal values of the cycle parameters are investigated. The simulations provide practical guidance on how to best and safely operate the cycle. A total of ten scenarios were simulated, of which six are acceptable, two are desirable, and two should be avoided. However, all scenarios can be safely controlled by the control infrastructure.

Wastelanding and Racialized Reproductive Labor: “Long Dyings” in East Chicago from Urban Renewal to Superfund Remediation

Abstract This article examines the gendered valence of environmental racism and white privilege as it unfolded in the history of urban renewal, public housing, and Superfund remediation in East Chicago, Indiana. Offering a deep history of the US Smelter and Lead Refinery Superfund site, it demonstrates that the historical process of “wastelanding” in the Calumet region relied on the exploitation of reproductive labor. The nonprofit Purdue-Calumet Development Foundation (PCDF)—led by Purdue University administrators and supported by East Chicago municipal administrators, academic researchers, and local business executives—spearheaded East Chicago’s urban renewal program. Through the course of executing these renewal measures, the PCDF co-opted Black and Brown women’s reproductive labor to accomplish their goals and relied on metaphors of feminized labor—particularly women’s stereotyped tasks of cleaning and nurturing—to explain and sanitize the social cost of slum removal. These historical legacies of politicizing reproductive labor are visible today in government officials’ continued disproportionate burdening of East Chicago’s minority women as the city navigates its lead poisoning epidemic. Housing and environmental government agencies (alongside their partners in industry) have reinscribed their reliance on traditional gender roles from the urban renewal era through the distant futurities of Superfund contamination sites. Tracing the long history of the city’s mismanagement of toxic environmental exposures reveals the need for environmental historians to study the important role of racialized reproductive labor in both the perpetuation of environmental injustices as well as the resilience of environmental justice communities as they work to survive devastating health impacts and social trauma.

Reversing the Tide of Suburban Families? The Design, Marketing, and Occupancy of Urban Renewal’s High-rise Housing

During the postwar urban renewal era, many US cities constructed high-rise downtown apartment buildings to lure families back from the suburbs. These projects met demand for high-end downtown housing. They often remain occupied today—in stark contrast to the more rapid demise of many other redevelopment projects designed for shopping, entertainment, or public housing use. Yet, they also often fell short of their larger demographic goals. This occupational history of New Haven, Connecticut’s first downtown high-rises shows that the projects’ architecture, site planning, public realm, and rental structures never lived up to either suburban alternatives or their own marketing promises.

The historical use of fire as a land management tool in New Zealand and the challenges for its continued use

New Zealand’s use of fire as a land management tool has had an extensive and lasting impact on New Zealand’s rural landscapes. We reviewed the historical rural use of fire by Māori and Europeans in NZ, discuss the challenges facing its future use as a land management tool and briefly compare with the international situation. We conducted a search using keywords and databases to review research articles on the historical use of fire in NZ. NZ experienced an historical two-phase anthropogenic use of fire as a land management tool since human arrival (c. 1280–1350 AD). In a forested non-fire adaptive environment, the widespread and intensive use of fire reduced natural forest cover from 85 to 90% prior to human arrival to 25% by the mid-twentieth century. Māori primarily used fire to clear travel routes, hunt for game, maintain bracken beds and clear land for crops. Europeans introduced a renewed era of burning, primarily for land conversion to agriculture, pasture regeneration, fuel load reduction, pest control and removing vegetation residues. Concerns regarding fire escapes, risks to infrastructure, environmental impacts, urban encroachment into rural environments and climate change may influence future use. NZ differs from other countries where fire is a natural component of the landscape, limiting its application as a tool for landscape restoration and its use on conservation land remains contentious. A third-phase use of fire is emerging in the rural sector, targeting niche burning for a range of specific purposes under the challenge of increasing environmental, social and regulatory constraints.

Replacing Truth with Social Hope and Progress with Redescription: Can the Pragmatist Philosophy of Richard Rorty Help Reinvigorate Planning?

Through a review of Richard Rorty’s philosophical work and critiques of original planning documents from the Urban Renewal era, this paper makes three points. First, a pragmatist epistemological approach offers a better foundation for planning than the current communicative paradigm. Second, updating planning’s Enlightenment roots with Rorty’s view of moral progress as a process of “redescription” can help reduce the anxiety planners feel in putting forward bold visions. Last, Rorty’s concept of the liberal ironist provides an interesting model for planners that sees equal value in the contributions made by both the Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Moses’s of the field.

Learning Lessons from the Urban Renewal Era

Learning Lessons from the Urban Renewal Era

Building a Local Preservation Ethic in the Era of Urban Renewal: How Did Neighborhood Associations Shape Historic Preservation Practice in Lexington, Kentucky?

The federal urban renewal program had wide-ranging consequences for American cities of all sizes and locations. Among the most consequential was its catalyzing effect on the historic preservation movement nationwide. While preservation practice at the dawn of the urban renewal era emphasized historic monuments, by its end in the mid-1970s, preservationists were much more concerned with neighborhoods, districts, and larger swaths of urban fabric, thus, becoming relevant to all manner of future city shaping and revitalizing efforts. While this expansion took place nationwide, the paths taken by individual cities varied considerably. Because of its large number of historic downtown residential neighborhoods, and its long involvement with historic preservation, Lexington, Kentucky, provides an ideal case study to explore this transformation, highlighting the ways in which neighborhood associations and local preservation organizations collaborated to set the stage for widespread adoption of local historic districts in the 1970s.

The planned destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900

ABSTRACTUnlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of plans to destroy them. City Beautiful era plans, development projects, and other public and private interventions displaced or sought to eradicate Chinatowns, from Los Angeles to Victoria to Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Urban renewal era projects destroyed large portions of many Chinatowns, and some entirely. This article traces these broad patterns and trends of planned and realized destruction and preservation across 15 of the major cities in twentieth-century Canada and the United States.

2EMF Understanding Emergency Medicine Providers’ Perceptions of the ACA in a Renewed Era of Health Care Reform: National Survey and Qualitative Mixed-Methods Approach

The 2010 ACA has been a source of divisive political conversation and widespread health care reform. In recent months, it has been the center of renewed national attention as many of the law’s key provisions face potential restructuring or repeal. Amidst the changing health system, emergency physicians take on a unique role, serving as the first point of contact for many patients. The objective of this study was to understand their perspectives, illustrating how current and future emergency physicians view the ACA and its impact on patients. The study consisted of 3 parts: a survey of a nationally representative subset of FACEP; a survey of current medical students intending to go into emergency medicine at 8 US medical schools; and a series of 35 qualitative in-depth interviews with current medical students, residents, and emergency physicians across the Yale New Haven Health System. All study parts were completed between September 2017-April 2018. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and a grounded theory approach. In order to compare outcomes between surveys, FACEP and medical students were matched on sex, race/ethnicity, and political ideology using coarsened-exact matching. A total of 945 FACEP and 137 medical students interested in EM completed the surveys (response rate: ≥98% FACEP and 36.9% of all medical students surveyed of whom 8.3% were interested in emergency medicine). Overall, 48.5% of physicians indicated having “good knowledge” of the ACA, 59.3% indicated support for the law, and 54.1% indicated that the ACA has resulted in better care for emergency medicine patients. Disagreement with parts of the law (31.9%) and issues with ACA design/implementation (18.8%) were cited as the most common reasons for opposition. Compared to practicing physicians, medical students planning a career in emergency medicine were significantly more likely to self-identify as having “good knowledge” of the ACA (RR[95% CI]: 2.10[1.90-2.31), indicate support for the ACA (1.53[1.39-1.69]), and believe that the ACA has resulted in better overall care for patients (1.35[1.23-1.49]). When asked in interviews about their perceived knowledge of the ACA, EM providers at Yale were more cautious about their proficiency (10/35 reported having “good knowledge”). All acknowledged at least partial support of the law, noting in select comments that “broadening of health care coverage is a moral imperative [⋯] no other viable alternatives have been proposed.” (resident) and that “while I struggle with the law as a whole, everyone deserves health insurance” (physician). All denied changes in their desire to practice medicine and the way that they perceive their work. They did, however, acknowledge an increased number of insured adult patients, awareness of cost-shifting within the hospital system, and concerns among patients with high-deductible private health insurance plans “about the costs of things like observation versus admission.” Both pediatric and adult providers reported seeing more patients. Despite differences in political ideology and concerns about aspects of the ACA, a majority of practicing physicians and medical students report support for the ACA. Future emergency physicians and residents were significantly more likely than board-certified physicians to favorably view the law and its impact on patients, providing insight into the potential direction of health care reform inspired by the next generation of front-line physicians.

Guest Editors’ Introduction to JLAS Special Issue on Athlete Activism and Sports Social Responsibility

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem prior to National Football League (NFL) games during the 2016 season, he quickly became a symbol of a renewed era of athlete activism, triggering collegiate and professional athlete activists across the country to join demonstrations and sparking national conversations about racism and police brutality. But athlete activism is much broader, extending to philanthropic work such as NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall’s efforts to spread mental health awareness and National Basketball Association superstar LeBron James’s funding of college scholarships for inner-city youth. Professional athletes’ willingness to take public stands on political and social issues is reflected and reinforced by sports entities’ social responsibility initiatives. For example, the NCAA relocated men’s basketball championship games out of North Carolina in response to a state law that curbed anti-discrimination protections for transgender people. Most sports leagues and governing bodies regularly participate in socially responsible causes.

Art! In What Sense?

This paper is a critique of the conception of art which is mainly based on Arthur Danto’s definition of art via Hegelian aesthetics. In 1964, when Danto encountered with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box a renewed era for the definition of art has come. For Hegel one of the most crucial criteria for art-work is its indispensible adequacy between content and presentation. Although Danto as a philosopher is so much Hegelian by the time of modern art there emerges a historical shift within art and this article tries to reveal how Danto departs from Hegel through the philosophical question of what makes any work an art-work. When there renders no ‘bodily’ distinction between content and presentation, there emerges an essential question: According to what one of the Brillo boxes inside a grocery store is just an ordinary box while the other one is such a precious artwork in Soho Gallery.

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies Eng-Beng Lim, chair, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, and Lori Lopez Grace Hong's Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) crosses disciplinary (de)limitations to model an Asian American studies project in intersectional, coalitional, and comparative terms. Our pick was guided by a sense of where Hong's book takes us in the field, and we think the suggested direction, at once bold and broad-based, is an important one for our time; Asian America has always been, and must continue to be understood as a collective field in conjunction with black and brown bodies. By rethinking how we know what we think we know about the field using sources that do not "look Asian American," the book stands out for its departure from any singular optic or subject organized by monolithic racial categories; in doing so, it renders Asian America in light of U.S. histories of racialization that are insistently comparative, and attuned to difference in illuminating ways. It presents a number of provocations that are steeped in questions of performativity (i.e., what would this text do to and within Asian American studies?) rather than questions of ontology (i.e., is this an Asian American studies text). To ask what it would be to receive Death Beyond Disavowal as an Asian American studies text only begins to scratch the meditative lessons of the book, organized around foundational examples drawn from black and Chicano studies, and fully charged in their critical import for Asian American lifeworlds. Hong's text resonates with Aihwa Ong's work (especially Neoliberalism as Exception, Buddhas in Hiding, and Flexible Citizenship), or Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwise, and we are excited to see how Hong's multi-and transdisciplinary model of scholarship can further encourage Asian American studies to perform a sustained and thorough engagement [End Page 462] with black studies, Chicano studies, indigenous studies, and queer/trans theory. As Hong's book teaches us again and again, such analytics and solidarities are vital for the survival of all of our various, embattled communities in a renewed era of white supremacy. Even if Hong's lesson is not directly organized around the example of Asian American subjects or their histories, it's one that could do vital work within and for Asian American studies. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

Revisiting the rigidly rotating magnetosphere model for σ Ori E – II. Magnetic Doppler imaging, arbitrary field RRM, and light variability★

The initial success of the Rigidly Rotating Magnetosphere (RRM) model application to the B2Vp star sigma Ori E by Townsend, Owocki and Groote triggered a renewed era of observational monitoring of this archetypal object. We utilize high-resolution spectropolarimetry and the magnetic Doppler imaging (MDI) technique to simultaneously determine the magnetic configuration, which is predominately dipolar, with a polar strength Bd = 7.3–7.8 kG and a smaller non-axisymmetric quadrupolar contribution, as well as the surface distribution of abundance of He, Fe, C, and Si. We describe a revised RRM model that now accepts an arbitrary surface magnetic field configuration, with the field topology from the MDI models used as input. The resulting synthetic H alpha emission and broad-band photometric observations generally agree with observations, however, several features are poorly fit. To explore the possibility of a photospheric contribution to the observed photometric variability, the MDI abundance maps were used to compute a synthetic photospheric light curve to determine the effect of the surface inhomogeneities. Including the computed photospheric brightness modulation fails to improve the agreement between the observed and computed photometry. We conclude that the discrepancies cannot be explained as an effect of inhomogeneous surface abundance. Analysis of the UV light variability shows good agreement between observed variability and computed light curves, supporting the accuracy of the photospheric light variation calculation. We thus conclude that significant additional physics is necessary for the RRM model to acceptably reproduce observations of not only sigma Ori E, but also other similar stars with significant stellar wind-magnetic field interactions.

Contextualising Organised Labour in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the US

AbstractWhile, as Marx argued, periods of expanded accumulation present the best conditions for increasing working-class living standards, the expansion that began in 1982 was based in large part on the rapidfallin the value of labour-power in the US. This recovery and rapid rise in the rate of surplus-value in the US was enabled by the collapse of union-resistance beginning in 1979 and the strategic choices made by union-leaders across the economy from that time on. The expansion was sustained in the 1980s by dramatic work-reorganisation, enabled by the embrace of labour-management cooperation-schemes by much of the trade-union leadership, and the restructuring of several major industries that undermined the industry-wide bargaining on which rising postwar incomes had been based. Productivity, boosted by lean production-methods, would continue to outstrip real wages up until the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 and resume again in the wake of a weak recovery in the US. The rapid geographic expansion of capital after 1990 provided new investment-possibilities, as did the explosion of financial instruments. What stands out, however, is that rising productivity, far from providing the basis for increases in working-class income, had become coupled with flat or declining real wages and a fall in the value of labour-power as the necessary condition to sustain almost any level of growth in the real economy. The link between productivity and wage-increases, central to Keynesian and institutional collective-bargaining theory, had been broken and Marx’s idea of the most favourable conditions stood on its head. The breaking of this link had, in the final analysis, been an outcome of class-struggle in which capital had the upper hand. All of this underlines the failed strategies and practices of most of the trade-union leadership in the US since 1979. New approaches to the workplace and broader forms of mobilisation will be needed. Signs of worker-resistance to the latest neoliberal clampdowns in Latin America, Europe, China, and even the US, however, may point to a renewed era of intensified class-struggle.

Derelict paradise: homelessness and urban development in Cleveland, Ohio

Seeking answers to the question, Who benefits from homelessness? this book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post--World War II urban renewal era as the new urbanism of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.

Public Health and Advocacy: Lessons from and for Urban Regeneration

Public Health and Advocacy: Lessons from and for Urban Regeneration