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The Relationship Between the Pension System and the Health of Elderly People in China
No full textM.P.P.The aging population and changing pension system in China pose significant difficulties to the country's social and healthcare policies. With the increasing number of elderly individuals, it is crucial to comprehend the complex connection between their health condition and the pension system. This thesis examines the correlation between variables using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), with a specific focus on persons who are 45 years old and older. We employ descriptive statistics and regression analysis to examine the impact of several pension schemes (government, institutional, and corporate) on the health outcomes of elderly individuals. We specifically investigate factors such as self-reported health status, physical handicap, and brain damage/mental retardation. The analysis additionally considers intervening variables such as income level, involvement in non-agricultural employment, and geographical position. Our results show the intricate nature of this connection, providing insight into the influence of pension schemes on healthcare expenditure, general well-being, and quality of life in older individuals. Our findings provide further evidence on challenges and facing the health and welfare of China's elderly population as pension dynamics continuously evolve
Phoenician Merchants and Ladies of Culture: Lebanon's Tourism Industry, 1943-1975
No full textPh.D.In Lebanon’s “Golden Age,” tourism was widely celebrated as the largest contributor to the national economy after finance. Lebanese imagined tourism as the savior of the Lebanese economy and a source of equitable wealth distribution and development. Tourism became a prominent feature of mainstream media culture in the 1960s. The industry and the media recruited Lebanese to play the role of hosts by performing Lebanese hospitality for Arab and Western tourists as a shared nation-building project. While this perception of tourism has proved enduring and inspires nostalgia for a pre-Civil War Lebanon defined by cosmopolitanism and tolerance, my dissertation discusses the prominent role of the Lebanese tourism industry in the troubled ideological landscape of independent Lebanon until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. I ask how local actors in the bureaucracy, tourism industry, and the media adopted, reinterpreted and appropriated global forces and trends of capitalism, globalization and increased global mobility within a domestic political context. My dissertation shows how upper class women, bureaucrats, and hotel owners sought to change the ways in which Lebanese perceived their own national heritage and history, and explores how Lebanon’s tourism culture influenced conceptions of gender, nature, development, heritage, and identity. It discusses the resulting anxieties about the foreign gaze, cosmopolitanism and public morality as well as opposition to tourism as a hegemonic force of development. My dissertation argues that that while tourism was successfully promoted as a unifying force of nation-building, tourism was an ideologically capitalist project that was pro-Western and sectarian. Tourism naturalized growing economic inequalities and promoted policies and “beautification” projects over the population’s needs. It promoted ways of conceptualizing history and heritage as well as the natural and cultural environment that painted Lebanon’s laissez faire policies as a defining national marker. Imbedded in Cold War politics and Lebanon’s culture war, the tourism industry helped mainstream Christian narratives of Lebanese history and identity that excluded Muslims and Islamic heritage. As an industry that disseminated a unified sectarian narrative despite its intersectarian composition, the dissertation prompts us to rethink sectarianism by prioritizing class and capitalism over sectarian belonging
Community Health Promoter Educational Workshop to Improve Knowledge of Postpartum and Neonatal Care
No full textD.N.P.In rural western Kenya, community health promoters (CHPs) serve to address access to health care for women and infants in their local communities. They do this by conducting home visits to offer health education, assistance, and referrals during the postpartum and neonatal period. Despite this and other health care initiatives, maternal and infant morbidity and mortality rates were increasing in this area. A quality improvement project was established to address the CHPs’ knowledge that supports their care. The objectives of this quality improvement project were to establish CHPs’ baseline understanding regarding the signs and symptoms of deteriorating maternal and newborn health during the postpartum period and to improve CHP knowledge regarding the criteria for referring cases to health clinics or hospitals. A culturally sensitive one-day educational workshop was designed for CHPs, incorporating key content identified by county health officials and consistent with health care standards. This content focused on enabling CHPs to recognize when a postpartum woman or neonate requires transfer to a hospital. The workshop utilized interactive discussions, case scenarios, and small group activities, supported by evidence from the literature. Pre-test and post-test assessments were conducted to gauge baseline knowledge and knowledge acquisition. Two workshops were held in different regions, with a total of 43 CHPs in attendance. To assess knowledge retention, a 1-month post-test was administered to participants. Repeated measure ANOVA demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge from pre-test to post-test. Paired t test demonstrated a significant increase in knowledge from pre-test to 1-month post-test. Interactive education methodologies increased CHP knowledge during a one-day workshop. The knowledge change was sustained from post-education intervention to 1 month post, and scores were significant from pre-test scores. Workshops for CHPs to build and sustain knowledge are essential to address maternal and newborn health. The outcome of this pilot project will be used to revise the workshop content and tests for future workshops
On the Interaction Between Nature and Agency in Niccolò Machiavelli’s View of History
No full textPh.D.Scholars have long pointed to the presence of naturalistic ideas and images throughout Machiavelli’s writings that seem to suggest an assimilation of human affairs into the dynamics of the natural world. In particular, readers have long wondered about the significance of cyclical theories of unfolding in Machiavelli’s account of history. The result has however been a vastly discordant set of opinions, ranging all the way from those who attribute to Machiavelli a strongly premodern, deterministic outlook to those who see in his ideas instead an instance of a modern valorization of human autonomy in shaping the historical world. In an attempt to escape this impasse, this dissertation argues that in his treatment of history Machiavelli consciously intertwined naturalistic aspects with an emphasis on human agency, stressing natural rhythms while also maintaining a keen awareness of the crucial role played by human beings in steering the course of the events. In order to recover this relationship, I start by reconstructing and analyzing Machiavelli’s conception of historical movement as modeled on the natural rhythm of growth and decay. The dissertation then shows how a proper assessment of this dynamic reveals the ways in which Machiavelli interpreted it as a process in which the type of influence exerted by natural factors — exemplified for instance by the notion of ambition — nonetheless ultimately rests on individuals’ awareness of these factors and our capacity to interact with them. In doing so, this dissertation reflects on the ways in which this reframing also sheds light on Machiavelli’s diagnosis of the political problems and challenges faced by him and his contemporaries
The Drivers of Mass Protests Against Sexual Violence in India: Tracing Continuity & Change
No full textHabitability: Planetarity vs Cosmopolitics
No full textAn important shift is taking place in environmental philosophy with regard to one of the field’s most fundamental concepts. The notion of ecological “sustainability” is being slowly replaced by the notion of the “habitability” of Earth in much contemporary discussion of environmentalism. This article focuses on two philosophies of habitability that have significantly impacted our thinking about climate change in recent years: planetarity and cosmopolitics. The two frameworks are frequently combined in various formulations of a more-than-human politics. Yet the philosophical paradigms, and their political implications, are, in fact, radically different, as this analysis will demonstrate. These crucial differences are amply evidenced through a comparative analysis of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent writing on planetarity and Isabelle Stengers’ work on cosmopolitics. The article argues, ultimately, that planetarity and cosmopolitics are incompatible. Further, the adoption of either approach corresponds to a specific philosophical and political choice that materially shapes the ways in which we think about politics with nonhumans in the 21st century.https://doi.org/10.57928/pfqt-0t1
The Correlation Between Maternal Mortality and Race: A State-Level Analysis of Disparate Outcomes in Maternal Health
No full textM.P.P.This paper seeks to take a small glimpse at the immense problem plaguing not only the United States but the world at large; maternal mortality rates. Deaths during pregnancy are some of the most preventable forms of death and are steadily on the rise in the U.S. While the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, the maternal mortality rates within the U.S. are some of the poorest amongst first world countries. This study looks at the maternal mortality rates for all races, black women, and white women as dependent variables and seeks to find what key independent variable(s) most notably influence(s) the mortality rate for better and worse. This study reviews panel data from all states within the U.S. and the District of Columbia for the years 2010 to 2019. The conclusion of this study shows that while there are many factors that can contribute to reducing maternal mortality amongst women of color like increasing healthcare expenditures by states or decreasing the wealth gap; there are also many factors, not examined within this study, which can also be useful as estimators for this problem. While this paper does not provide the answer to the increasing mortality rates amongst women of color, it does provide a diverse perspective on the issue and policy recommendations such as standardizing care across communities. The U.S. has a moral, legal, and ethical obligation to ensure that preventable deaths are prevented, and all women are protected
Do Neighborhood Property Values Change Following Voluntary Flood Buyouts?
No full textM.P.P.Voluntary flood buyouts are an increasingly common flood mitigation strategy inwhich state or local governments purchase homes from willing sellers and prohibit future
development on the land. Most research has focused on the effect of buyouts on the
homeowners who accept them, but there are likely consequences for the people who
remain in their neighborhoods as well. My thesis investigates the effect of buyouts on
property values within a zip code. I use panel data on voluntary flood buyouts
implemented through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), the largest
source of flood buyouts in the United States, and property value data from Zillow. The
nation-wide sample includes zip codes that experienced a Presidential Disaster
Declaration between 2005 and 2017, making them eligible for HMGP funding. I conduct
a propensity score-weighted difference-in-differences analysis and find that property
values decline following a disaster, and that buyouts buffer against much of this decline.
Although maintaining property values can be one argument for buyouts, and used to
communicate the benefits of buyouts, policymakers should also be wary of how stable
property values can inaccurately portray the true (or even increasing) levels of flood risk
in a neighborhood
Confidence and Populism: The Relationship Between Confidence in Parliament and Populist Voter Preference in Europe
No full textM.P.P.As populism proceeds on its forty-year rise across Europe, European policy makers continue to rely on the frameworks of political science to understand this diverse and widespread phenomenon. Populism’s political saliency has been attributed in turn to cultural, economic, and political conditions, and this lack of consensus underscores the difficulty of the task political scientists face in explaining populists’ behavior. In my investigation of populism’s explanations, I perform a regression to people’s survey responses related to their trust in parliament, and their preference for populist parties. I find evidence to support political explanations for populism, demonstrating the difference between populist and non-populist voters’ confidence in their parliaments. I use the Quality of Governance Institute’s 2021 survey data and the PopuList political party database to develop my predictive model. My results reaffirm that, despite its maturation, European populism can still be recognized by anti-establishment sentiment in this decade
Intestinal Epithelial and Immune Host Receptors in Giardiasis
No full textPh.D.Giardia duodenalis is a common protozoan parasite in low- and middle-income countries. Infection is not associated with life-threatening diarrhea and is often subclinical. Regardless of the presence of symptoms, however, giardiasis is linked to growth stunting in children under age two. Both the growth challenges seen in children and the absence of severe gastrointestinal distress are not well understood. There is a limited number of studies considering potential host-pathogen receptors in giardiasis and none of them are driven by the interest in exploring these clinical observations. During my dissertation work, I focused on the roles of the protease-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) and the macrophage galactose-binding lectin 1 (MGL1) in responding to Giardia infections. PAR2 modulates tight junctions between intestinal epithelial cells, while MGL1 is an innate immune receptor involved in maintaining tolerance to the resident microbiome via IL-10. Antagonists of PAR2 prevent the loss of barrier integrity seen during in vitro Giardia stimulations. In animals, loss of PAR2 similarly reduces (but does not eliminate) the growth challenges observed in recently weaned infected mice fed a low-protein diet. Up to 40% of children with Giardia have persistent infections; we also see that infected animals on a low-protein diet have delayed parasite clearance and upregulated IL-10. MGL1 activation and the resulting production of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 might have a role in reducing intestinal inflammation and allowing Giardia to persist in the host. In vitro, Giardia acts via MGL1 to synergize with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in the production of IL-10 but not of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-ɑ. The parasite’s modulation of the LPS immune response is significant both for parasite interactions with resident bacteria and in the context of co-infections. We show that Giardia is likely not signaling through a protein since the IL-10 potentiation is maintained after the parasite extract is heated. Ultimately, both PAR2 and MGL1 are novel receptors in the immune response to Giardia and future work will further explore the relevant ligands