The Political Impact of Chewing Khat (Chat) on Chewers: In the Case of Woldia City Administration of North Wollo, Amhara National Regional State

The main aim of this study was to investigate the political impact of chewing khat on the chewers in Woldia City Administration of North Wollo, Amhara National Regional State. As far as the researcher's reading, no research was conducted in Ethiopia dealing with the political impact of chewing khat on chewers. Accordingly, this study was conducted using qualitative methods of data collection. Semi-structured in-depth interview, focus group discussion (FGD), and complete observation were employed during data collection. The study used phenomenology design and the findings were analyzed thematically. The study found that khat chewers’ political unconsciousness, utopian involvement in politics, and fail in conspired politics were associated with khat chewing practices. Based on this findings, the researchers recommend that awarness creation about the anxiety of khat in political life is in need.

Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art

From a small community of pioneering artists who experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1970s, AI art has expanded, gained visibility, and attained socio-cultural relevance since the second half of the 2010s. Its topics, methodologies, presentational formats, and implications are closely related to a range of disciplines engaged in the research and application of AI. In this paper, I present a comprehensive framework for the critical exploration of AI art. It comprises the context of AI art, its prominent poetic features, major issues, and possible directions. I address the poetic, expressive, and ethical layers of AI art practices within the context of contemporary art, AI research, and related disciplines. I focus on the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the epistemic or political ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary culture, AI science/technology, economy, and society. By comparing, acknowledging, and contextualizing both their accomplishments and shortcomings, I outline the prospective strategies to advance the field. The aim of this framework is to expand the existing critical discourse of AI art with new perspectives which can be used to examine the creative attributes of emerging practices and to assess their cultural significance and socio-political impact. It contributes to rethinking and redefining the art/science/technology critique in the age when the arts, together with science and technology, are becoming increasingly responsible for changing ecologies, shaping cultural values, and political normalization.

The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States

This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens’ votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics. (JEL D72, J15, J24, J61, R23)

How does water talk, and other hopeful questions about and beyond gender and language

The inaugural issue of Gender and Language focused on unanswered questions and unquestioned assumptions. This essay revisits these questions, thinking about next steps not only for the field, but also for the larger feminist, anti-racist, anticolonial world our work aims to build. In particular, I consider two questions with impacts for thinking about how to deepen the political impact of our own work, in the realms of social and environmental justice. First, how can we ensure the kind of work we are publishing in this journal has an impact beyond university conversations? Second, have we gone far enough, as a field, in reconsidering not just questions of gender and of language, but also of what we imagine as persons?

URDU-22 Historical review of the beginning and evolution of feudal system and its social and political impact in Saraiki District Dera Ghazi Khan

Majority people of the District are Saraiki speaking in Dera Ghazi Khan but they under the strong hold of Baloch feudal Lords. Feudalism is not a new issue in our society actually it is an ancient issue of the human society. The term feudalism was started from Europe in medical period during the decline of Roman empire. The continuous wars between Great Britain and France divided the people and stratification of society appeared in Europe. Feudalism was very close to the policy of divide and rule. In 1857 colonial Government was established in India and they also exercised the same. They won the second Sikh war in 1849 and then with annexation of Punjab they became the ruler of India. With their extension policy they marched toward the west of Indus. During forward policy they granted and obliged the various tribes of Dera Ghazi Khan. But after 1854 when they marched in Balochistan they faced a strong and powerful resistance in the tribal belt of Dera Ghazi which was an important route and area before Balochistan. The continual resistance forced the colonial government to negotiate with tribes. In this regard Robert Sandeman was given the Task to manage these tribes and after mutual discussion in 1866 Sandeman became successful to form the Tumans in Dera Ghazi Khan. The tribal Chief was appointed as a Tumandar. Tumandar or the feudal lord is very powerful in his Tuman and the feudal system is still existing even in 21st century.

Appraisal of Socio-Economic and Political Implications of COVID-19 Pandemic on Residents of Enugu State, Nigeria

COVID-19 pandemic determines public health, presenting the biggest threat since the Second World War. All continents, except for Antarctica, are active in battling the pandemic. As other socio-economic and political problems are arising from this crisis, the pandemic cannot only be attributed to health issues. Every nation affected by this pandemic may witness a destructive or ravaging social, economic, political and psychological backlash that may leave long lasting scars. The World Bank has projected a decline in remittances of $110 billion and 800 million people will not be able to meet basic needs this year, with the International Labour Organization (ILO) forecasting that over 195 million people will lose their jobs. In managing this pandemic, there is a need for strategic planning by a government organization through the development of long-lasting policies that will help minimize the impact on individuals and nations. Previous experiences of epidemics such as Ebola, HIV, SARs, TB and Malaria will therefore be valuable in the development of policies that can help to mitigate the socio-economic and political impact. The solution may lie in contacting the most vulnerable through crowd sourcing to provide them with food, in particular life necessities. Expanded social security may also be an important step in that direction for the disadvantaged and the disabled.

Organized memory and popular remembering: The encounter of Yugonostalgia theories with socialism

The article first examines the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of Yugoslav socialist past in Slovenia. We examine the discursive patterns in political dignitaries’ declarations and reconstruct popular remembering as it emerges from the existing research. We focus on theories that conceptualize positive popular attitudes towards socialist past with the notion of ‘nostalgia’. Following the ways how researchers overcome the difficulties of the ‘Yugonostalgia’ approach, we note that they do not take into account the embeddedness of the positive achievements of socialism into the overall fabric of socialist system. According to our hypothesis, this omission induces the researchers to overestimate the present social and political impact of positive attitudes to socialist past. Furthermore, social struggles in which researchers are engaged seem to raise barriers to scientific practice. This study attempts to contribute to the project of Yugoslav memory studies.

Graphic Reminders: Confronting Colonialism in Canada through Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story

David Alexander Robertson’s 2015 graphic novel Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story connects non-Indigenous Canadians to the racial realities of Canada’s intentionally forgotten past. Robertson translates Helen Betty Osborne’s biography into the accessible format of the graphic novel which allows for a wide range of readers to connect present day racial injustices to the past, generating new understandings surrounding violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Helen Betty Osborne, a young female Cree student was abducted and murdered in 1971, targeted for her race and gender. The horrors Betty experienced reveal the connection between her story and the contemporary narrative of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story deconstructs Betty’s life from the violence she is subjected to, personifying a historical figure. The graphic novel allows for a visual collision of past and present to express the cycle of colonial violence in Canada ignored by non-Indigenous Canadians despite its continued socio-economic and political impact on Indigenous peoples. As an Indigenous author, Robertson preserves the integrity of Indigenous voice and revives an integral gendered and racialized historical perspective that is necessary to teach. This close reading of Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story explores how Robertson uses the graphic novel to revive history and in doing so, demonstrates connections between past and present patterns of racial injustice against Indigenous women in Canada today.

Harmoniously Denied: COVID-19 and the Latent Effects of Censorship

While few would doubt that censorship is a form of surveillance, the practice and theory of censorship does not hold as prominent a place within surveillance studies as one might think. In this paper, we demonstrate the constitutive effects of censorship that seep into the collective mentality and, in Foucauldian terms, “conducts the conduct.” We examine the wider socio-political impact of China’s censorship of COVID-19. We argue that censorship is a force “at large.” By this we refer to the pervasive uptake of censorship practices at different levels and how censorship manifests itself as a form of power unchained, making it difficult, if not impossible, to track and contain its impact, even for the authorities. We argue that censorship surveils the expressed and, by extension, regulates the not-yet-expressed. It surveils what can be perceived and, by extension, pre-conditions the not-yet-conceived. We highlight the domestic impact of how China’s censorship regime bends its population into acquiescing to a harmonious denial of its collective prospects and how it curtails the global response.

Presentación del número monográfico sobre Expressing Hatred: The Political Dimension of Expressives

Desde hace unos años, se ha producido dentro de la filosofía analítica un movimiento de acercamiento a las prácticas reales y de huida de las idealizaciones no justificadas que pretende poner las herramientas conceptuales desarrolladas durante el último siglo al servicio de la justicia social. En el ámbito de la filosofía del lenguaje, este giro ha pasado por el análisis de expresiones del lenguaje natural que, por no encajar de forma completamente satisfactoria con la concepción del significado como condiciones de verdad, han recibido tradicionalmente poca atención. Sin embargo, estas expresiones juegan un papel fundamental en la comunicación con impacto político. Hablamos de los expresivos, esto es, expresiones que se utilizan para comunicar una cierta actitud. El propósito de este número especial de Daimon es ofrecer una panorámica de algunos debates que se están desarrollando en la actualidad en relación con la dimensión política de los expresivos, pero también de discusiones cercanas que en ocasiones se solapan con esta, tanto en filosofía del lenguaje como en ramas de la filosofía afines. For some years now, there has been a movement within analytic philosophy to get closer to real practices and to flee from unwarranted idealizations in order to put the conceptual tools developed over the last century at the service of social justice. In the field of philosophy of language, this turn has involved the analysis of natural language expressions that, not fitting in a completely satisfactory way with the conception of meaning as truth conditions, have traditionally received little attention. However, these expressions play a fundamental role in communication with political impact. We are talking about expressives, that is, expressions that are used to communicate a certain attitude. The purpose of this special issue of Daimon is to offer an overview of some of the debates that are currently taking place in relation to the political dimension of expressives, but also of related discussions that sometimes overlap with it, both in philosophy of language and in related branches of philosophy.