Subverting transphobia and challenging ignorance

In this article, I present two moments of interaction emerging from a focus group between young people who are members of a community of practice: a support group for transgender youth and their parents. Using discourse analysis, I demonstrate how the young people work collaboratively to construct a mutual identity, which foregrounds their shared experience of transgender issues and minimises differences between them. I argue that they do this to actively challenge and resist the discrimination they experience due to transphobia and ignorance, which includes attempts to ‘other’ them. I show how the young people ascribe themselves agency by subverting the heteronormative ideologies which inform this othering, thus constructing an active, resistant and validated mutual identity rather than a victimised, submissive or othered one. This identity work tells us much about the hugely important role played by support groups in helping young people to construct a positive persona in the face of transphobic discrimination.

Israel and the Jewish Diaspora

The Israel-Diaspora relationship is characterized by mutual identity construction. Israel depends on the Diaspora for material and ideational support; some corners of the Diaspora draw on Israel to underwrite its ongoing project of identity construction and maintenance, while others see the State of Israel as a safe haven in the face of anti-Semitism. Twenty-first-century Diaspora Jewish politics is animated by increasingly intense debates over Zionism, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, the question of evolving attachment to Israel (and the meaning of the concept of attachment itself), and the place of Israel in collective Jewish consciousness through donor-supported programs such as Birthright. The Israel lobby, particularly in the United States, provides a stark institutional manifestation of many of these dynamics, with respective foreign policies toward Israel serving as flashpoints for various Jewish electoral and identity debates.

Foundations in Germany: Social Welfare

The article presents the aims, approaches, and activities of German social welfare foundations and how they position themselves toward other actors in the field of social welfare provision. The field is characterized by competition and the opening up of the system to deal with the societal challenges of increased demand heterogeneity through migration and demographic changes. Differences in size and approach of the foundations are the main focus and reveal a different understanding and fit toward the challenges of changing demand between old and new subsidiarity. Besides the mutual identity of social foundations in aiming at relief, the large operating foundations more often identify with change, they act complementary and more often consider other actors as important for their work. The small foundations in the field have a charitable–substitutive self-conception.

Regionalisme Isu Lingkungan Asia Tenggara (1997-2000)

Southeast Asia is an ever growing region. Since 1970, the region hasshown a strongperformance in economic growth and it’s still continued even today. However, the strong economic growth of Southeast Asia also lead to serious externalities in a form of environmental degradation. Deforestation and pollution which has been done in one country affected the nearby countries as well, decreasing the air quality in urban area, and creating many cases of economic losses and health issues. At one point, the Southeast Asian countries realized that environmental degradation is a transnational problem which needed a transnational solution. Regionalism, which is facilitated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), became the solution they seek. This paper attempts to explain the process of Environmental regionalism that has happened in Southeast Asia from 1977-2000. The paper concludes that the process of environmental regionalism in Southeast Asia is still stucked in the third phase of regionalism. Lacks of mutual identity between ASEAN members prevents environmental regionalism process in Southeast Asia to advance to the fourth phase. However, the paper also shown some probabilities for it to happen in near future. Keyword: ASEAN, Environment, Regionalism, Regionness,

Collaborative Mutual Identity Establishment (CMIE) for the future internet

Purpose – This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of the existing protocols that address the security issues in the Future Internet (FI) and also to introduce a Collaborative Mutual Identity Establishment (CMIE) scheme which adopts the elliptical curve cryptography (ECC), to address the issues, such as content integrity, mutual authentication, forward secrecy, auditability and resistance to attacks such as denial-of-service (DoS) and replay attack. Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides a comparative analysis of the existing protocols that address the security issues in the FI and also provides a CMIE scheme, by adopting the ECC and digital signature verification mechanism, to address the issues, such as content integrity, mutual authentication, forward secrecy, auditability and resistance to attacks such as DoS and replay attack. The proposed scheme enables the establishment of secured interactions between devices and entities of the FI. Further, the algorithm is evaluated against Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Application (AVISPA) tool to verify the security solutions that the CMIE scheme has claimed to address to have been effectively achieved in reality. Findings – The algorithm is evaluated against AVISPA tool to verify the security solutions that the CMIE scheme has claimed to address and proved to have been effectively achieved in reality. The proposed scheme enables the establishment of secured interactions between devices and entities of the FI. Research limitations/implications – Considering the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, another important aspect that is the device-to-location (D2L) aspect has not been considered in this protocol. Major focus of the protocol is centered around the device-to-device (D2D) and device-to-server (D2S) scenarios. Also, IoT basically works upon a confluence of hundreds for protocols that support the achievement of various factors in the IoT, for example Data Distribution Service, Message Queue Telemetry Transport, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and so on. Interoperability of the proposed CMIE algorithm with the existing protocols has to be considered to establish a complete model that fits the FI. Further, each request for mutual authentication requires a querying of the database and a computation at each of the participating entities side for verification which could take considerable amount of time. However, for applications that require firm authentication for maintaining and ensuring secure interactions between entities prior to access control and initiation of actual transfer of sensitive information, the negligible difference in computation time can be ignored for the greater benefit that comes with stronger security. Other factors such as quality of service (QoS) (i.e. flexibility of data delivery, resource usage and timing), key management and distribution also need to be considered. However, the user still has the responsibility to choose the required protocol that suits one’s application and serves the purpose. Originality/value – The originality of the work lies in adopting the ECC and digital signature verification mechanism to develop a new scheme that ensures mutual authentication between participating entities in the FI based upon certain user information such as identities. ECC provides efficiency in terms of key size generated and security against main-in-middle attack. The proposed scheme provides secured interactions between devices/entities in the FI.

Multi-Factor Identity Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol

This paper proposes scheme can achieve mutual authentication and session key agreement based on multi-factor. It improves the scheme proposed by Chuang et al on protecting from the stolen smart card attack, impersonation attack, server spoofing attack and man-in-the-middle attack, and guaranteeing on the forward security. It solves the problem of weak resistance to attacks in single-factor authentication approaches, by combining the smart card with biometrics and password. It also guarantees the security of mutual identity authentication between users and servers and that of session keys. It consumes more computing resources that the Chuang’s scheme, but it can resist to several known attacks efficiently.