Globalization,Plague and the Local Community: Healthcare Capacity,Politics, and the Microbe War

Abstract

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) is the first major international epidemic of the twenty-first century. In a few short months it spread to every continent, infected 8,096 people, and claimed the lives of 774. It hit older persons particularly hard; it killed 50 percent of the infected of that age category.

The rate of plague's spread from one country to another has greatly increased as the globalization of the world's economy has produced rapid daily transportation of people, products, plants, animals, and, of course, microbes. Each day cities are at risk for the invasion of deadly infectious diseases. While international expert agencies such as the World Health Organization stand by to help fight outbreaks, ultimately, plagues are fought in the local community.

I discuss two theses: (1) To successfully contain and fight a major epidemic the capacity of the community's health care system must be enhanced by its functional linkages to external expert and bridging organizations and systems of organizations; and (2) that the extent to which a community's health care system can draw on external expert and bridging organizations and systems is a function of the degree to which the political state in which the community is embedded facilitates for fails to facilitate) those linkages.

My focus is on Hong Kong and the cities of the People's Republic of China; they were at the epicenter of the SARS outbreak, and it was from them that the contagion spread to other countries. Findings show that plagues are not only matters of biology and health, but also matters of politics, power, and international relations.     

Freedom ossified or economic crisis? A comment on Holger Henke

This article contends with the view that the political crisis in some Anglophone Caribbean countries—primarily Jamaica—can be understood as arising from the black middle‐class leadership's use of race and nationalism to obscure class issues. It argues that the race and national issues were and are legitimate class issues and that it is theoretically and practically a mistake to counterpose the two. The black middle class achieved important victories against colonialism and racism but now is faced with global economic and political forces for which it is ill‐equipped to address. The political crisis that it faces is more a result of these global forces than it is of the internal weakness of this class.     

The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Response to Peak Oil

ABSTRACT

After the two-fold crises of the liberal world order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, including the debacle of the Global War on Terror and the global financial crisis around 2008, we are witnessing a combined crisis of US hegemony and the transnational moment, along with the explosion of populism across the Atlantic world. In this context, this research not only analyses how the United States has designed and maintained the liberal interstate order and globalization but also the way the hegemon proactively starts to destroy its cross-national project today. Therefore, I aim to fathom the future of globalization by interrogating the current US state's key strategies that express America's changing national identity and self-role conception under shifting structural imperatives from unipolarity to the emerging multipolar world.     

How SES May Figure in Perceptions of Zika Risks and in Preventive Action

abstract

The present study intended to determine how the socioeconomic status (SES) of citizens and public health communications help explain citizens’ risk perception and actions taken during Zika virus outbreaks in 2016. We used data from a nationally representative study conducted in March 2016 by the Associated Press–National Opinion Research Center to analyze 831 American adult responses regarding Zika. We found that respondent risk perception and actions taken diminished as SES level rose. Risk perception was also found to mediate preventive actions’ associations. To quell the global spread of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) like Zika, health organizations worldwide must understand how SES contributes to Zika (and other future EIDs) risk perception and preventive action. A more compelling form of public health communications must be developed that takes into account the impact made on future outbreaks and infections by these higher-SES “risk assessments.”     

Trends in cardiovascular diseases and associated risks in sub-Saharan Africa: a review of the evidence for Ghana,Nigeria, South Africa,Sudan and Tanzania

Background: Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries are facing an epidemiological shift from infectious disease to chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). CVDs incidence in SSA are frequently attributed to the prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, and overweight/obesity. Nevertheless, some researchers contend that CVDs are not a priority public health problem in SSA.

Method: This paper systematically reviews the evidence on CVDs and their relation with hypertension, diabetes mellitus and obesity/overweight in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan and Tanzania. The publication’s content was analyzed qualitatively using the directed content analysis method and the results were presented in a tabular format.

Result: The paper illustrates the rising prevalence of CVDs as well as the three related risk conditions in the selected SSA countries.

Conclusion: The review indicates a poor health system response to the increasing risk of CVDs in SSA. The conditions and major drivers that contribute to this underlying increasing trend need to be further studied.     

US college and university student health screening requirements for tuberculosis and vaccine-preventable diseases, 2012

ABSTRACT

Objective: Colleges are at risk for communicable disease outbreaks because of the high degree of person-to-person interactions and relatively crowded dormitory settings. This report describes the US college student health screening requirements among US resident and international students for tuberculosis (TB) and vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) as they relate to the American College Health Association (ACHA) guidelines. Methods/Participants: In April 2012, US college health administrators (N = 2,858) were sent online surveys to assess their respective school's TB screening and immunization requirements. Results: Surveys were completed by 308 (11%) schools. Most schools were aware of the ACHA immunization (78%) and TB screening (76%) guidelines. Schools reported having policies related to immunization screening (80.4%), immunization compliance (93%), TB screening (55%), and TB compliance (87%). Conclusion: Most colleges were following ACHA guidelines. However, there are opportunities for improvement to fully utilize the recommendations and prevent outbreaks of communicable diseases among students in colleges.     

Gender,race and global modernity: A perspective from Thailand

Abstract

This paper draws from cultural studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to track the trafficking in racism and sexism in the cultural economy of contemporary globalization. It approaches this by looking at how global modernity is enacted by Thais and Westerners in Thailand. The author argues that the pursuit of global modernity in Thailand leads Thais to invite and embrace global modernity's racist and sexist core, thereby constituting their self-orientalization. Globalization's racist and sexist economy of desire is shown to be manufactured and retailed by both global and local corporations and to operate in international education, public health, the mass media and public culture. The paper is based on a decade of participant observation and field research.     

What is Flint? Place,storytelling, and social media narrative reclamation during the Flint water crisis

ABSTRACT

The Flint Water Crisis became a national news story in January of 2016, when major publishers such as The New York Times began covering the story. In the same month, an influx of social media activism occurred in response to the crisis, with citizens developing hashtag campaigns such as #FlintFwd in order to disseminate news and stories from a citizen’s perspective; these campaigns often positioned Flint positively ? as a recovering community ? rather than a city in the middle of a public health crisis, and often addressed not a national public but a local audience. This paper considers Flint-based social media activity to investigate the emergence of place-based activism within the ostensibly global network of social media. In doing so, it identifies three key themes; 1) leveraging social media to forward a critique of deficient journalistic storytelling; 2) using the affective process of storytelling via social media to claim authority over their own material offline existence, and 3) using place-based storytelling to implicate others as witnesses via the global network of social media. These themes coalesce around a distinctly critical logic of connectivity. This logic extends the notion of connectivity articulated by Van Dijck and Poell [2013. Understanding social media logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14.] and the strategies of platform activism explored by Tufekci [2017. Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven: Yale University Press.] to explain how social media works to expose discrepancies between the public story of the water crisis and material, lived conditions of Flint, rendering visible a discursive identity of Flint thus far unrecognized.     

Policy recommendations for rare disease centres of expertise

AimRare diseases are a serious public health concern and are a priority in the EU. This study aims to develop policy recommendations for rare disease centres of expertise (CoEs) in order to improve standards and quality of care.Subject and methodsA modified 3-round Delphi technique was used. Participants included rare diseases patients, carers, patient representatives and healthcare professionals (HCPs) from CoEs in two countries—Denmark and the UK.ResultsThe results suggest the need to make improvements within current CoE environments, access to CoEs and the need for coordination and cooperation of services within and outside CoEs. It is recommended that CoEs are not overly ‘medicalised’, while at the same time they should be established as research facilities. The importance of including patient representatives in CoE performance management was also highlighted. Raising awareness and provision of appropriate training amongst non-specialist HCPs is seen as a priority for early and correct diagnosis and ensuring high quality care. Similarly, provision of targeted information about patients’ illness and care was considered essential along with access to social assistance within CoEs.ConclusionsPolicy recommendations were developed in areas previously recognised as having gaps. Their implementation is expected to strengthen and improve current care provision for rare disease patients. In member states where national plans and strategies are being developed, it is recommended to replicate the methodological approach used in this study as it has proven to be a helpful tool in rare disease centres of expertise policy development.     

Attending to the world: competition,cooperation and connectivity in the World City network

World Cities are acknowledged to be a key aspect of globalization. In many accounts, these cities are depicted as rivals in a global marketplace, their economic success a result of their competitive advantage. However, what has not been fully acknowledged is their connectivity and, in addition, the time and effort taken by specific ‘attendants’ to produce the World City network. Accordingly, this article aims to advance understanding of World City network formation by developing a conceptual model that focuses on four major attendants (firms, sectors, cities and states) that enact network formation through two nexuses —‘city‐firm’ and ‘statesector’— and two communities —‘cities within states’ and ‘firms within sectors’. The utility of this model is demonstrated by drawing upon interviews conducted in offices of 39 advanced producer service firms in banking and law. These interviews were undertaken in three World Cities (London, New York and Singapore) in the wake of the East Asian financial crisis, an event that challenged the consistency of the World City network. Showing how attendants sought to maintain and transform the World City network at this key moment of crisis, we conclude that studies of city competitiveness ultimately need to focus on the cooperative work that sustains global networks.     

Of desire,the Farang,and textual excursions: Assembling ‘Asian AIDS’

ABSTRACT

This article documents and discusses the neo-orientalist tendencies in the First World's sporadic coverage of ‘Asian AIDS’, with a particular focus on the localized context of Thailand. It takes the problem of ‘Asian AIDS’ as a critical point of articulation between a health crisis and the specific geopolitical movements of capital, tourism, and desire within the processes of globalization. In order to highlight the episodic nature of the First World's narrative about HIV/AIDS in Thailand and to witness the necessarily fragmentary quality of representation in the global sphere involving competing and constantly moving voices, I attempt to enact an imaginary dialogue in the form of what Trinh T. Minh-ha has termed ‘textual excursion’. The purpose of this imaginary dialogue is to elaborate on the various strands of narratives and different levels of discourse (for example, the documentary, the theoretical, the imaginary, the political) that comprise the field of jumbled voices. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Pacific and Southeast Asia is taking shape around the configurations of globalist imperatives, it illuminates a dual process: the revitalization of orientalist fantasies in the global sphere and the self-orientalizing tendencies within the Asian world captured by global development. It also illuminates the necessity of addressing the problem of ‘Asian AIDS’ as a migrating vector.     

Humanitarian Melodramas,Globalist Nostalgia: Affective Temporalities of Globalization and Uneven Development

Abstract

The formal conventions of global humanitarianism when performed as melodrama, structured around temporal devices such as peripeteia, deferral, delay, and missed chances, reveal some of its affect-making roles in globalization. The melodramatic flourishing of Live Aid commemorative events and commodities in the twenty-first century suggests there is a melancholic attachment to Euro-American global hegemony, retroactively and repetitively constructed as a missed chance to do good that always meant well. The melodramatic enactment at Live 8 of the ‘end’ of global poverty promised by Live Aid patches over the discontinuities between the era of development internationalism and neoliberal globalization, creating a moralized image of Euro-American globalization as a ‘long-standing’ form of humanitarian power that can be lamented in place of confronting the absence of any alternative explanatory framework for escalating processes of uneven development. By suspending time, melodrama creates a fantasmatic site for aspiration, ambivalence, melancholy, and nostalgia without resolving their contradictions.     

Compassion Fatigue,Compassion Satisfaction,and Burnout

Summary

Over the past several decades the mental health field has become increasingly concerned about potential negative effects in professionals of providing crisis intervention and traumatic stress services to individuals and groups. The employee assistance (EA) field has not received adequate attention with regard to the study of these negative effects, such as compassion fatigue. This paper highlights results from a national research study of members of the Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA) who were assessed for risk for compassion fatigue and burnout, as well as potential for compassion satisfaction. Additionally, coping methods for dealing with work-related stress resulting from the provision of workplace crisis intervention services were measured. Findings indicate that EA professionals who provide clinical services and/or crisis intervention services in the workplace are at low risk for burnout, moderate risk for compassion fatigue, and have high potential for compassion satisfaction. Implications for the EA field, in terms of training and practice, are discussed.     

Globalization: Myths and Realities1

Abstract The current decline of the developmentalist paradigm, and its view of the rural as increasingly residual, revitalizes rural sociology. The blossoming of studies of rurality and ecology is paralleled by the growing currency of globalization as an object of analysis. This is more than a coincidence—in fact, globalization crystallizes local diversity. The two phenomena go hand in hand. But each needs to be understood as an historical construct; that is, they need to be problematized. In problematizing “globalization,” I argue that it must be understood as a post-developmentalist construct. The postwar goal of national development, institutionalized in the international Bretton Woods regime, has run its course—dramatized by the assault on developmentalist states and institutions in the monetarist regime established under the auspices of the 1980s debt crisis. The nationally oriented institutions of the developmentalist era are now being replaced by globally oriented institutions under the legitimizing cloak of efficiency and financial credibility. Related to this trend, producing communities scramble to reposition themselves either through finding niches in a new global economy or through resistance to global pressures. Either way, there is a new emphasis on defining the local. This article explores the conjunction of global and local definition.     

Crisis on campus: Eating disorder intervention from a developmental-ecological perspective

ABSTRACT

Objective: The purpose of this article is to review a crisis intervention using the developmental-ecological protocol (Collins and Collins, 2005) with a college student presenting with symptomatology of an active eating disorder. Participants: Participants included University Wellness Center employees responding to the crisis. Methods: Methods include an informal review of the crisis intervention response and application of the ABCDE developmental-ecological crisis model. Results: Results reported include insight into crisis intervention when university counseling and health center is not available as resources. Conclusions: ABCDE Developmental-ecological model recommendations for university faculty and staff are included.     

Resisting terror,resisting empire The evolving ethos of American Studies

Abstract

The internationalization of American Studies is a reflection of its evolution from provincialism into a new regionalism. This raises the question of coping with the transnational while problematizing the national, thus landing American Studies in the welter of globalization both as a process and as a discourse. The global engagements of the US have produced global anti-Americanism. Terror in conjunction with globalization appears to have subsumed all other discourses in our times. To pursue American Studies in an environment of terror becomes more complicated by the fact that America itself is perceived by many as a source of global terrorism, evoking the chimera of the return of empire as envisaged in the recent work of Hardt and Negri. Resistance to the global reach of the American Empire and a global percolation of terror appear to be the two most crucial intellectual concerns of American Studies at the moment.     

Paul U. Kellogg and the Survey: Voices for Social Welfare and Social Justice,by Clarke A. Chambers. Minneapolis,University of Minnesota Press, 1971. 296 Pages, $10.00. Hardbound

Abstract

Previous research showing that roughly half of social work students report a history of familial alcohol abuse—and proposing that such abuse might affect these students' current mental health and professional performance—relied on self-reports without standardized screening measures. This 1991 study, based on a convenience sample of 136 MSW students at the University of Texas at Austin, determined students' status as Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACAs) by self-reports and scores on the Children of Alcoholics' Screening Test, and evaluated related mental health functioning with four standardized measures. The results suggest that well under half of social work students are ACAs, and that not all (nor only) ACAs were vulnerable to mental health problems.     

The fanta-sy of global products: fizzy-drinks,differentiated ubiquity and the placing of globalization

ABSTRACT

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate how this exists in an assemblage which maintains coherence across space (i.e. is universally recognizable) yet is spatially differentiated in its components. Shedding light on how these processes coalesce in place we argue for the acknowledgement of the ‘ubiquitous’ in making place and the importance of difference in underpinning the ‘global’.     

Bangladeshi women migrants amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: Revisiting globalization,dependency and gendered precarity in South–South labour migration

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered unprecedented societal disruption and disproportionately affected global mobility dynamics. Within such a troubled and intensifying crisis, the intersection of migration and gender is even more unsettling. Since the pandemic outbreak, Bangladesh witnessed a colossal crisis among millions of Bangladeshi migrants working overseas—a considerable section of them are women. By highlighting the plight of the Bangladeshi women migrants in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, this study expands the emerging literature that addresses the nexus among migration, pandemic fallout and gendered labour. Redrawing our understanding of globalization from below, the study attempts to further advance the theoretical perspectives on the predicaments of globalization and gendered precarity in contract labour migration. The study argues that the focus on the power asymmetry between the host and sending countries remains too limited to provide a comprehensive understanding of how inequalities are reproduced and transformed. Instead, it suggests that the challenges and disadvantages women migrants endure are embedded in the asymmetries of deep-rooted economic and social structures in tandem with the systemic practice of otherness and exclusion.     

Two dynamics of globalization in the context of a sports mega-event: the case of UEFA EURO 2012 in Poland

ABSTRACT

The article uses the theoretical framework of Saskia Sassen’s two dynamics of globalization in order to analyse the relations between a nation-state and a non-state global actor when applying and preparing for a sports mega-event, namely UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland. The first dynamic of globalization is created by global institutions, organizations – such as global sport organizations, regimes, and processes. UEFA used the application process, and preparation, to confirm and consolidate its role as a global governor of an increasingly important area of globalization. The way Polish public institutions accommodated the UEFA requirements illustrates the second dynamic of globalization. The context of sports mega-events – ‘organized’ by global sports organizations and ‘hosted’ by nation-states – merges the two dynamics and makes it possible to emphasize the mechanisms involved in forming the new global order, defined by the complex interplay between the nation-state and non-state actors.