Search Results (44)

The green economy has become an economic necessity and a cultural discourse due to the rapid global movement towards sustainability. This paper discusses the representation of green economy in Qatar and Malaysia, two countries with different political and cultural background but similar ambitions to attain sustainable development on social media. Through the application of qualitative techniques, namely thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis, the re-search analyzed Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn posts discussing sustainability, renewable energy, and green innovation by using hashtags and stories on the topic. The results indicate that four major themes exist in both settings, and they are sustainability as national pride and identity, corporate–government branding of green efforts, grassroot and citizen involvement, and conflicts around contradictions and skepticism. Green economy in Qatar is constructed as a symbol of prestige and international presence, which is directly connected to the Qatar National Vision 2030, and popularized at the state and corporate levels. Big projects, financial solutions like green bonds, and sustainable infrastructure are mentioned in narratives and criticism is afforded little space. The environmental sustainability is part of cultural representation and collective accountability, grassroots mobilization, youth activism, and defiance of official and corporate language in Malaysia. A dynamic and critical digital discourse is often criticized by the citizens when they face perceived greenwashing. The research adds to the theoretical knowledge of understanding of framing theory that civic space plays a role in the development of sustainability discourses and the importance of critical discourse analysis in studying power relations in environmental discourse. In practice, the study recommends that Qatar should engage its citizens in more than just symbolic branding; Malaysia should enhance transparency and consistency of its policies to curb the skepticism of its people. In general, the paper highlights the fact that social media is not simply a medium of communication but rather a controversial field on which the definitions of sustainability are actively discussed. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study explored the lived experiences of nursing students in South Korea who participated in clinical practice at Community Treatment Centers (CTCs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: This study was designed as a qualitative study and applied Colaizzi’s descriptive phenomenology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten nursing students who practiced at CTCs for three to four weeks. Data were analyzed through Colaizzi’s seven procedural steps to derive the essential structure of their experience. Data saturation was achieved, and methodological rigor criteria were applied. Results: Four overarching themes emerged: (1) transformative growth through immersive clinical practice in quarantine; (2) enduring and adapting to uncertainty and emotional turmoil; (3) reconciling vulnerability and responsibility as future professionals; and (4) validation and pride in becoming visible during a national crisis. Conclusions: The study revealed that CTC practice constituted a transformative learning experience that enhanced students’ professional identity and resilience in disaster situations. Findings highlight the need to integrate disaster ethics and psychosocial preparedness into undergraduate nursing curricula. Full article

Studies on tax compliance have predominantly used the theory of planned behavior. This study combines the theory of planned behavior with social identity theory. This study examines tax fairness (subjective norms), tax complexity (perceived behavioral control), tax morality (attitudes toward behavior), and national pride as social identity theory that explain their impact on tax compliance levels. Using non-probability random sampling, this study successfully collected 401 individual taxpayer respondents and analyzed them using PLS-SEM. The results of this study revealed that national pride is a crucial component in improving taxpayer compliance behavior. TPB theory still makes a significant contribution to tax compliance intentions through tax fairness and tax morality. This research suggests that tax authorities should manage tax funds by providing a sense of fairness and improving taxpayer morality. On the one hand, the government needs to promote national pride among taxpayers. This has the potential to remind taxpayers of the presence of taxes and encourage the mobilization of funds from the tax sector for national development. Full article

Elaborating on the concept of heteroglossic stylization, this paper examines how a Moroccan comedian—Zakaria Ouarssam—stylizes Tamazight (Berber)-influenced Moroccan Arabic (MA) in order to evoke comedic personae associated with the country’s Middle Atlas region. Our analysis focuses on Ouarssam’s on-stage performances to document the complex multilingual repertoire that allows him to (i) create contrasts between a supposedly unmarked MA and a stylized Tamazight-influenced MA and (ii) evoke comedic stances that associate the latter with stereotypes of his home region. Particular attention is given to Ouarssam’s use of code switching between Tamazight-influenced MA and untranslated Tamazight as a novel and potentially boundary-pushing practice when considered in the context of its live performance on national television. The paper argues that Ouarssam’s stylized performances contribute to the construction and valorization of an alternative expression of Amazigh and regional pride, even as they reproduce certain linguistic hierarchies and ideologies. Full article

This paper suggests a theoretical framework to summarise the empirical literature on the relationships between sports and both religious and secular ethics, and it suggests two interrelated theoretical models to empirically evaluate the extent to which religious and secular ethics, as well as sports policies, affect achievements in sports. I identified two national ethics (national pride/efficiency) and two social ethics (social cohesion/ethics) by measuring achievements in terms of alternative indexes based on Olympic medals. I referred to three empirical models and applied three estimation methods (panel Poisson, Data Envelopment, and Stochastic Frontier Analyses). I introduced two sports policies (a quantitative policy aimed at social cohesion and a qualitative policy aimed at national pride), by distinguishing sports in terms of four possibly different ethics to be used for the eight summer and eight winter Olympic Games from 1994 to 2024. I applied income level, health status, and income inequality, to depict alternative social contexts. I used five main religions and three educational levels to depict alternative ethical contexts. I applied country dummies to depict alternative institutional contexts. Empirical results support the absence of Olympic ethics, the potential substitution of sport and secular ethics in providing social cohesion, and the dependence of sports on politics, while alternative social contexts have different impacts on alternative sport achievements. Full article

Heritage buildings, which symbolize the pride of a nation, were built prior to the development of current standards, including those for accessibility. As nations strive for equity, diversity, and inclusion, creating barrier-free environments, including heritage buildings, becomes imperative. This study aims to identify the “true” accessibility barriers of heritage buildings. Accordingly, a three-part study was conducted: review current standards and best practices; document and investigate the accessibility lived experiences of people with different abilities in heritage buildings; and analyze and discuss the data. The findings revealed that 19%, 17%, and 64% of reported “true” barriers per building were attributed to the conflict between accessibility and heritage preservation, accessibility standard clarity/specificity, and accessibility standard compliance, respectively. In comparison, accessibility-trained professionals attributed 16%, 39%, and 45% of their assessments to the same categories. A significant number of accessibility barriers in heritage buildings can be mitigated by applying current standards. The accessibility needs of people with cognitive/intellectual disabilities are the least addressed and understood by the standards and accessibility-trained professionals. Full article

The reversal of the trend towards the decline in income inequality in the last four decades in most countries has created favorable grounds for the rise of nationalist and anti-globalization sentiments. Economic failures of countries, groups of people and individuals are among important factors that cause nationalism. The rise of nationalism in many countries in recent decades, as measured by the decline in the “pride in your own country” indicator from the World Values Survey, is statistically significantly related to the change in income inequality (Gini coefficient) within the country. When globalization is properly managed, it is good for growth and income distribution and does not lead to nationalism. But if it is accompanied by the decline in real incomes for large masses of people, nationalist political forces have additional arguments for instigating anti-globalization and isolationist sentiments. The rise in income inequality within major countries since the 1980s poses a threat not only to social stability, but also to globalization. Full article

Tourists’ pro-environmental behavior (TPEB) is crucial in promoting the sustainable development of tourism worldwide. It has received increased attention from scholars in different fields of tourism, but relevant research on the normative activation and formation process of TPEB in geotourism is lacking. Given the complexity of behavioral causes and norm activation, this study is grounded in multiple theories, including the norm activation model (NAM), behavioral reasoning theory (BRT), and complexity theory, to illustrate the formation process of TPEB in geotourism. The Zhangye National Geopark, which is located in Gansu Province, China, was chosen as the research case for this study. In total, 502 valid survey responses were utilized for data analysis using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The PLS-SEM results showed that tourist intention for pro-environmental behaviors is linearly affected by moral norms, attitude, social norms, and perceived behavioral control, which are the key components in the NAM and BRT. The fsQCA results identified six causal recipes components that influence the formation of intention for pro-environmental behaviors, confirming the causal complexity principle of complexity theory. Among these, environmental awareness, anticipated emotion of pride, moral norms, attitude, and social norms are considered core variables. These research findings provide significant management guidance and strategies for the environmental protection of geoparks and the sustainable development of geotourism. Full article

This essay explores the political dynamics of the Godzilla film franchise over the past 70 years, arguing that critical and scholarly characterizations commonly oversimplify the movies’ complicated messages, which reflect the complex, often contradictory responses of Japanese filmmakers and audiences to the experiences of war, the atomic bombings, defeat, occupation, lasting subordination to the United States, and a seemingly endless postwar period. The analysis focuses on Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (1954), in which pacifist sentiments are tempered by depictions of military weaponry and patriotic pride, and Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One (2023), where ahistorical narratives, misty-eyed nostalgia, and ultranationalist tropes co-exist with strong anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment themes. By contextualizing these two films within the contested history of early postwar Japan and the polarized politics of the early twenty-first century, this essay suggests that the Godzilla series has shown remarkable continuities over time and has captured the profound ambivalence with which the Japanese people have negotiated memory, nationalism, and the charged relationship between Japan and the United States since the end of World War II. Full article

Background: As the number of large-scale outbreaks continues to rise worldwide, clinical trials are increasingly engaging disease-affected peoples within the Minority World (nations with over 80% poverty rates). Yet global health research inadequately addresses potential ethical issues of including impoverished, disease-affected populations and their contextual vulnerabilities in medical research. Objective: This paper presents a mixed-method analysis from our 2022 semi-structured survey capturing the experiences of Liberian Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) survivors serving as study participants in the Partnership for Research on Ebola Virus in Liberia (PREVAIL) clinical trials. Methods: Firstly, we conducted an extensive literature review of the scholarship related to biomedical research and ethical standards protecting study participants to inform our survey method and design. Applying a theoretical framework on vulnerability, we then qualitatively explored the survey responses of 19 EVD survivors’ perceptions and experiences taking part in PREVAIL, including their expectations, treatment, delivered benefits, and quality of care. We further quantitatively codified their statements for underlying themes of reported negative experiences against standard ethical regulations in biomedical research, conducting a statistical analysis to inform generalizability. Most of the 19 survivors reported facing extreme ongoing vulnerabilities related to their disease status, including physical impairments, psychosocial stress, and socio-economic inequity. Results: Initially, the survivors tended to experience a sense of hope and pride in volunteering for PREVAIL. One in five participants reported benefiting from PREVAIL’s regular medical diagnoses. However, most of their survey responses indicated prevalent negative shared experiences, including continually being confused or misinformed of their study participant rights, roles, and benefits; being burdened by heavy participation transaction costs; and repeated incidents of poor treatment and discrimination by PREVAIL staff after initial recruitment. PREVAIL participant satisfaction ranking is negatively correlated with receiving insufficient financial compensation (r = −0.51), extensive time requirements for each medical visit (−0.40), and being poorly treated by clinical staff (−0.67). Full article

Eviction could hold a different meaning if a home’s immediate surroundings contribute to its residents’ livelihood, especially for informal laborers. This paper explores the notion of the fragility of a home within an expanded space—the space on which a home stands and its surroundings when turned into a contested area. It specifically looks at the slum of Yamuna Pushta in Delhi, which was demolished in 2004. The act uprooted thousands of low-income families who were blamed for polluting the river. The demolition was fueled by new urban visions and planning strategies, political and capitalist ambitions, projections of national pride, and an event-driven approach camouflaged under an environmentalist concern attempting to “clean” the river. Using the photographic works of artist, curator, and activist Ravi Agarwal as a case study, this paper argues the presence of a counternarrative in the works, challenging the projected environmentalist discourse around the river, the slum dwellers. This study further states the dual marginalization of the Pushta residents and the Yamuna by critiquing the economic format of majoritarianism through the growing normalcy and agreeability of the slum demolitions by the urban non-poor disguised as the “greater good”. Full article

Anthropologists of religion are preoccupied with questions of identity, community, performance and representation. One way they cope with these concerns is through a reflexive examination of their ethnographic positionality in the field. This provides an opportunity to engage not only with “the other”, but also to explore their own identities and background. This article presents an autoethnographic analysis of Pride Shabbat, a special service held in June to celebrate the intersection of Judaism and queerness. The service took place at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) as part of their 50th-anniversary celebration. Since the 1970s, CBST has been known as the largest gay synagogue in the world and provided diverse religious and spiritual services to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community. Based on my participation in this specific event in June 2023, I draw distinct differences between the Israeli Jewish LGBTQ community and the American Jewish LGBTQ community, such as issues related to ageism and multigenerational perceptions within the gay community, the internal dynamic for gender dominance, as well as diverse trajectories of queerness, religiosity and nationality. Symbolically, contrary to the common perception that the diaspora looks to the state of Israel for symbolic and actual existence, this inquiry sheds light on the opposite perspective; the homeland (represented by the ethnographer) absorbs and learns from the queer Jewish practices and experiences taking place within the diaspora (the American Jewish LGBTQ community). This is an opposite movement which reveals the cracks in the perception of the gay community as a transnational community, as well as the tense power relations between Israel and American Jewry. Full article

The 2020 census reports that 61.2 million Latinxs live in the US, totaling around 19% of all residents, forming the country’s largest minority population. With the growing number of Latinxs, there has been a higher level of contact between Spanish and English leading to language mixing or code-switching (CS) in mainstream American culture. This paper examines the Spanish/English CS in radio advertisements on Los Angeles’s 96.3 La Mega, a bilingual radio station geared towards today’s youth. Using Derrick’ 2015 sentential framework for the linguistic analysis of multilingual sentences, I carry out a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the linguistic nature of the on-air bilingual advertisements. I explore both national advertisements, as well as DJ-endorsed advertisements, to discern whether they follow the patterns previously pointed out in the literature for positive consumer evaluations of Spanish/English bilingual advertisements. Furthermore, I am interested in if these advertisements are in line with the ethos of 96.3 La Mega, which prides itself on being fully bilingual. This research will shed light on the linguistic nature of contemporary strategies being used in bilingual advertisements for the US Latinx community and marketing tactics designed to encourage their consumerism. Full article

This study explores how images of the past have been deployed to set up current arrangements of leadership and institutional identity by considering the career and teachings of Thích Thanh Từ in connection with his “revived” Buddhist tradition in Vietnam. Promoted as a continuation of the unique and pure Vietnamese Buddhist meditation tradition and associated with the Vietnamese national identity, the contemporary Trúc Lâm (Bamboo Grove) is a pride of many Vietnamese Buddhists. The original Trúc Lâm is claimed to be founded by the heroic King-turned-monk Trần Nhân Tông in the thirteenth century. The tradition was supposedly transmitted through the next two generations and died out. In the twentieth century, a Southern Vietnamese monk, Thích Thanh Từ (1924–), who had quit Pure Land (Tịnh Độ, C. Jingtu 淨土) Buddhism to self-learn and practice meditation, decided to reinvent the medieval Trúc Lâm tradition and became the founder of the contemporary Trúc Lâm. Despite growing up during French colonization and American war, Thanh Từ was not politically involved; instead, he focused on setting up new monasteries, taught meditation, and discouraged his followers from political and social engagement. This paper examines how successful Thích Thanh Từ and his disciples are in popularizing Trúc Lâm in Vietnam, given that the majority of Vietnamese Buddhists follow Pure Land devotional practices. More importantly, it describes how Thích Thanh Từ combines the teachings attributed to Trần Nhân Tông and two Chinese Chan masters, Huike 慧可 (the Second Patriarch) and Huineng 惠能 (the Sixth Patriarch), to form Trúc Lâm’s philosophical views and meditation techniques. With the clear-cut distinction between the delusional mind of sentient beings and the perfect mind of enlightened beings, Thích Thanh Từ presents the goal of Trúc Lâm practice as attaining the state of no-thought and sharpening it to perfection to perceive the “buddha nature” (phật tính, S. buddhadhātu, C. foxing 佛性) understood as the pure mind of nonduality and nonform. Outlining that process, he emphasizes the importance of “sudden awakening” (đốn ngộ, C. dunwu 頓悟) followed by “gradual cultivation” (tiệm tu, C. jianxiu 漸修). His meditation manual for ordinary practitioners with no experience of sudden awakening contains key techniques of (1) stabilizing the mind by counting and then observing breaths, (2) recognizing the “true mind” (chân tâm, C. zhenxin 真心) through practicing “no abiding in thoughts” (biết vọng không theo), “no mind for the externals” (đối cảnh vô tâm), “no dualistic discrimination” (không kẹt hai bên), and then proceeding to the stage of permanently abiding in the nature of true mind. These meditation methods are pertinent to Trúc Lâm’s view that all phenomena that emerge via speculative thoughts are unreal and illusory, and that only the true mind is real. The first section of this paper explores historical connections between Vietnamese and Chinese forms of Buddhism, shedding light on why Trúc Lâm embraces Thiền Tông, which is transmitted from Chinese Chan zong, and how Thích Thanh Từ builds connections between Thiền Tông and the Vietnamese national identity. The second section focuses on Thích Thanh Từ’s own life story, on how he practiced meditation and suddenly experienced “unlearned wisdom” (trí vô sư/vô sư trí, C. wushi zhi 無師智, an alternative term for true mind and buddha nature as a result of his practice) and how he succeeded in spreading the “revived” Trúc Lâm. With the first two sections as a background, in the third section, this paper explores Thích Thanh Từ’s views and practices and critically analyzes those views and practices in the conclusion. Overall, I argue that Thích Thanh Từ’s instructions on meditation are closely intertwined with his view of reality, which in turn is based on the mainstream Chan zong ideas. Full article

Mango productivity and fruit quality in Australia can be improved through transforming low-density plantings to high-density plantings and intensive training systems. Several planting density and training systems were established in Australia to investigate optimizing light interception and distribution, yield and fruit quality, and to reduce tree vigor and biennial bearing through the manipulation of canopy architecture. In this research, we studied light relations and yield in conventional low-density commercial orchards of different ages and investigated light relations and yield of ‘National Mango Breeding Program NMBP1243’, ‘Keitt’ and ‘Calypso’ grafted to ‘Kensington Pride (KP)’ rootstock in a replicated experiment. Trees were trained to five planting systems: high-density espalier and conventional, medium-density single leader and conventional, and low-density conventional. Our study in commercial orchards showed that maximum yield was ~16,000 kg/ha when light interception reached ~49% and declined at higher levels of light interception. In the high-density intensive training systems, we found that light interception increased with canopy volume, with high-density espalier training systems intercepting more available light compared to medium-density training systems and low-density conventional trees. Yield/ha increased to ~50,000 kg/ha in espalier training systems when light interception was ~40%. Light interception, canopy volume and yield/ha varied between varieties. Full article