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The relationship between climate risk, climate policy uncertainty, and CO2 emissions: empirical evidence from the US
Get PDFThis paper examines the relationship between climate risk and climate policy uncertainty, and CO2 emissions in the US over the 2000–2022 period using a structural Factor- Augmented Vector AutoRegression (FAVAR) model with a two-step principal component analysis based on monthly observations. We employ a very recent measure to proxy for uncertainty regarding climate policy based on the Climate Policy Uncertainty Index (CPU) of Gavriilidis (2021), while Climate Risk is proxied by financial cost of natural disasters and number of deaths. We use different variables for CO2 emissions, based on total and sectoral emission (commercial, electric power, residential sector, transportation, and industrial sector). The results indicate that a significant percentage of the variance of CO2 emissions in the US, is explained by Natural Disasters Cost, which also seem to account for a significant percentage of the US Total Renewable Energy Consumption variance. Shocks to disaster costs seem to decrease all type of emissions significantly and also increase renewable energy use significantly. Natural disasters increase political disagreement among U.S. politicians, as well as, the climate policy uncertainty, highlighting the need for efficient policymaking and regulations. In further results, we find that an increase in Partisan Conflict decreases emissions and explains a significant amount of renewable energy variance
Making Gothic mountains: Everest and the EcoGothic
Get PDFAn ecoGothic Everest is arguably a contemporary phenomenon, a lived experience, where human perceptions of the mountain as both monstrous and desirable are enacted through its commodified and environmentally unstable condition. Climate-change�induced alterations on Everest are exacerbated by commercialism: melting glaciers, thickening air, and corrupted waters as corpses and human waste litter the mountainside.
Meanwhile, there are accusations that Dark Tourism has found a home on the crowning peak of ‘the roof of the world,’ as would-be summiteers photograph bodies acting as route-markers, and droves of hopefuls pay large sums to swarm upon the slopes in their summit bids, regardless of numerous fatal tragedies fuelling the criticism of ‘bagging’ this most prestigious of peaks. Despite the contemporary nature of the ecoGothic on Everest, its manifestation is born out of a historical literary imagination which created
the iconography of the Gothic mountain, alongside the rise of mountaineering and its accompanying literature. This article considers how the Gothic aesthetic has influenced mountaineering and in fact contributed to the creation and maintenance of an ecoGothic Everest. The Gothic terror of Everest today is not generated primarily through fictional reimaginings of the untameable wilderness, but through encountering the human-made degradation of the peak, consolidating the mountain as a site of lived ecoGothic in current times. By focalising Everest through the ecoGothic, George Mallory’s famous statement of intent to summit, ‘because it is there,’ no longer seems a legitimate motivation behind so-called human mastery of the mountain
Introduction: Why inheritance
No full textBook synopsis: This book makes a compelling case for placing the social and legal practices of inheritance centre stage to make sense of fundamental questions of our time.
Drawing on historical, literary, sociological, and legal analysis, this rich collection of original, interdisciplinary and international contributions demonstrates how inheritance is and has always been about far more than the set of legal processes for the distribution of wealth and property upon death.
The contributions range from exploring the intractable tensions underlying family disputes and the legal and political debates about taxation, to revisiting literary plots in the past and presenting a contemporary artistic challenge of heirship.
With an introduction that presents a critical mapping of the field of inheritance studies, this collection reveals the complexity of ideas about 'passing on', 'legacies', and 'heirlooms'; troubles some of the enduring consequences of 'charitable bequests', 'family money', and 'estate planning; and, deepens our understanding of the intimate and political practices of inheritance
Will the SDGs and UN Decade of Healthy Ageing leave older people behind?
Get PDFSince the 1950s, multi-national institutions have taken a number of positions towards population ageing and later life. In 1994, the World Bank (WB) saw population ageing as a crisis that needed "averting". The United Nations (UN) approach evolved from the individualized, compassionate ageism of 1981 to a developmental, ‘society for all ages’, perspective in 2002. Yet the UN made comparatively little headway. In 2021 the UN launched its Decade of Healthy Ageing to support the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’s ‘leave no one behind’ goal. The UN rightly sees ageing as a lifelong, societal and developmental process and strongly supported the evidence that unequal resource distribution is the main contributor to health inequalities across the life span. Despite this evidence, the focus is now on a bio-medical framing of impaired health and on a multi-stakeholder approach that emphasises the Silver Economy’s economic potential. The first two years of the Decade saw significant efforts to generate private sector support. While the Decade of Healthy Ageing is still young, there is much good, harm, and missed opportunity that can happen in a decade, justifying early consideration of what the Silver Economy bio-medical approach will do for older people in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs)
News from the East
Get PDFThe first dateable English printed document is an indulgence to raise money against the Turks. In this essay I take this indulgence, printed by Caxton at Westminster in 1476, as a starting-point to consider fifteenth-century English literary and cultural representations of Rhodes and the advancing Ottoman Turks. I place this in the context of the ‘emergence of contemporaneity’, to use Brenden Dooley’s phrase, as a facet of later medieval media. John Kay’s Siege of Rhodes, probably printed in 1482, reflects the interest in current affairs both at Edward IV’s court and at the humanist Italian courts where Kay had spent time. I consider Kay’s status as ‘laureate’.
I then introduce a letter from John Paston, describing a Turk in his household, and the fifteenth-century poem The Turke and Sir Gawain, to consider how the Turkish male body is represented. I argue that representations of the Turk in later medieval England reveal admiration, fear, and a sense of proximity and similarity. Such representations show how the Turk was frequently discussed in cultural discourse, and inaugurate the ‘Turk’ as a discursive representation in the English imagination.
I argue that the recent turn to the ‘Global Middle Ages’ must globalise according to a time-bound and changing senses of the wider world; we should therefore acknowledge the importance of the growing Ottoman empire to fifteenth-century England. This reveals how much English culture was actively and urgently involved with contemporary ‘newesse’ (news) and timely reports of the parlous state of Christian lands in the Eastern Mediterranean
Neurodiversity coaching: a psychological approach to supporting neurodivergent talent and career potential
Get PDFBook synopsis: Neurodiversity Coaching demystifies the themes and assumptions affecting neurodivergent coachee experiences at work, whilst at the same time exploring the necessary safeguards required for working with this vulnerable group.
The book supports existing coaching practitioners, managers and community leaders to understand the essentials of neurodivergence, a term which encompasses ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and Tourette Syndrome, and how these diagnoses require specific coaching approaches to support individuals to thrive at work. This book is practically focused on the “how”, sharing coaching exercises and activities that have been evaluated and researched by authors with extensive experience in the field. Grounded in coaching psychology theory, those with existing knowledge will be able to transfer their skill set to the neurodiversity context and those who are considering learning more about coaching can be signposted to essential knowledge and skills.
Neurodiversity Coaching will be suitable for independent coaching practitioners and internal organisational coaches and managers seeking a coaching approach
The use and abuse of queer history
Get PDFReview of Anita Kurimay's book 'Queer Budapest 1873-1961' (2020), which examines the complexities of queer lives, representations and politics in Hungary bewteen the 1870s and the 1960s
The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program by Kevin McLaughlin (review)
No full textThe Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin’s Critical Program. By Kevin McLaughlin.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. iv + 208. Paper $32.00. ISBN
9781531501693.
This book is a concentrated contribution to the diverse field of Walter Benjamin
studies, a crowded field but one that endlessly offers unploughed vistas, lending
credence to Benjamin’s own concern with the unfurling afterlife of works. Kevin
McLaughlin’s new study is about the life of creative work and its relation to life in
general, as theorized by Benjamin in the early part of his writerly career, through
essays written at a point when he was still a student under the umbrella of the
university
For a consistently democratic and internationalist left: a contribution to left renewal and transformation
No full textWe have been watching the civilian death toll in Gaza mount, in horror, day by day, for weeks on end now. We are appalled and outraged at the collective punishment meted out to Gazans by the IDF, increasing settler violence in the West Bank, and repression by the state and right wing mobs against Palestinian citizens of Israel. In the US, in Europe, in India and elsewhere, Palestine activism as a whole is demonised by many mainstream politicians and much of the media, and in some cases criminalised by the state. Much Western reporting on Israel/Palestine is soaked through with civilisational racism, often framing Israelis as modern, Western, civilised people whose suffering is somehow more real and important than that of Palestinians. Racist dehumanisation of Muslims and Arabs contributes to the suffering that is being experienced by Palestinians.
In this context, there is an understandable impulse to focus only on the immediate. It can feel like this is not the right time to talk about what’s wrong with left Israel/Palestine activism, and the left more generally.
But we believe that in the face of crisis, self-reflection is more, not less, important. It is now, not later, that we need to critically reflect on whether the dominant perspectives in our movements, broadly defined, are the right ones for actually winning change
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