Search Results (54)

This study investigates the challenges and opportunities of balancing cultural preservation, tourism investment, and community resilience in historic Syrian cities during the post-war recovery period. The Syrian conflict has imposed considerable harm upon the nation’s cultural heritage, encompassing UNESCO World Heritage sites, thereby interrupting not only the urban infrastructure but also local economies and social networks. Utilizing a comprehensive methodology that includes a literature review, stakeholder interviews, and local surveys, this research investigates the potential for aligning cultural preservation with tourism investment to promote sustainable economic revitalization while simultaneously enhancing social cohesion and community resilience. The results underscore the significance of inclusive governance, participatory planning, and capacity enhancement to guarantee that post-conflict urban redevelopment fosters enduring environmental, social, and cultural sustainability. By framing the Syrian case within the broader context of global urban sustainability and resilience discourse, the study offers valuable insights for policymakers, urban planners, and heritage managers working in post-conflict or post-disaster environments worldwide. In the end, the study highlights that the revitalization of historic cities transcends being a simple technical or economic endeavor; it is a complex process of re-establishing identity, strengthening communities, and fostering sustainable, resilient urban futures. Full article

The Nigeria–Biafra war (1967–1970) has been regarded as the first major civil war in post-colonial Africa, with an attendant and colossal loss of lives, property, and infrastructure. There are many representations of memories of the war in fiction, non-fiction, symbols, memoires, and post-war relics (usually found in museums) but the role of personal naming practices has been largely neglected in the literature and social narratives of the war history. This article, therefore, aims to investigate the performance of personal names as significant memorial sites that convey trajectories of post-traumatic experiences of the war and the desire for healing and reconciliation. The study adopts the theoretical lens of the socio-onomastic analytic framework, which explores the social contexts in which names are given and used. Drawing on ethnographic data sourced mainly from personal histories and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants in Nsukka (Enugu State) and Owerri (Imo State) in southeastern Nigeria, we argue that personal naming practices form essential elements of the war memory, which positively impact self-recovery and meaningful connection with the people. The study concludes that war-related names are based on name-givers’ lived experiences and life-altering situations that greeted the war and are useful in sharing and preserving collective memory of the war. Full article

The ongoing war in Ukraine poses an uncertain future, highlighting the need to prioritize reconstruction efforts even before the war ends. Japan’s recovery mechanisms have developed based on the experiences and lessons learned from natural disasters such as the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and from war damage by World War II. This study aims to draw practical insights and lessons from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake for Ukraine’s postwar recovery and help achieve rapid and high-quality results. This study reviews the literature, policy documents, and reports on recovery from the disaster. It was found that streamlining environmental impact assessments, land use regulations, and land acquisition could accelerate recovery. Engaging the private sector promoted the reconstruction of critical infrastructure and housing projects. This Japanese case study highlights the importance of ensuring sustained commitment and avoiding setbacks in the recovery process by establishing legislative, planning, and institutional frameworks, as well as financial mechanisms. Protecting human health is paramount, even if more resources are needed to manage hazardous materials. Applying these valuable lessons to Ukraine requires careful consideration, including leveraging foreign investments to supplement limited domestic resources and establishing effective governance structures that promote transparency, accountability, and coordination. Full article

Informed by hitherto unreported archival materials and the relevant literature, this short paper employs a case study of the post-war Hong Kong Government’s administration of the so-called Kowloon Walled City to elucidate two fundamental principles of land administration in the use of land: (a) certitude of land boundaries and (b) public health and safety. Land administration of this densely populated and growing habitat, being a territory under disputed colonial jurisdiction, was characterised by the meticulous enforcement of an officially adopted boundary and the implementation of a site and service approach for a high-rise settlement by the Colonial Hong Kong Government. Full article

Background: The literature highlights the profound psychological impact of war on children, families, and communities, emphasizing the prevalence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and other symptoms among affected individuals. Interventions, such as Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) and music therapy, show promise in mitigating trauma effects, underscoring the need for holistic approaches that address familial and community dynamics alongside individual well-being. Methods: Aiming to explore the influences of dyadic music therapy sessions on parents’ capacity to support their children, this study involved four families displaced from their home-kibbutz as result of a terrorist attack. All dyads participated in music therapy sessions with a focus on parent–child interactions and trauma processing (CPP informed). Embedded in a qualitative, phenomenological approach, the research utilized interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and micro-analytic methods to explore meaningful moments in the music therapy sessions. Results: Findings identified four central categories: (1) Discovering the child’s grounding song: identifying resources; (2) Musical improvisation sets the grounds for parent–child mutual recognition of the child’s traumatic experience; (3) Musical performance empowers child and parent; (4) A sense of agency is gained through controlling the musical environment. Conclusions: The significance of restoring the children’s freedom of play, the parents’ sense of competency, and of enhancing families’ capacity to connect to their traumatic experiences through the musical environment is discussed. Full article

Israel’s war on Gaza following 7 October 2023 has given birth to several political and social changes in European nations. According to the United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur, Israel has used this moment to “distort” international humanitarian law principles “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In the European context, this has led to European Muslims and non-Muslims, including organizations, institutions, as well as individual academics, politicians, and activists mobilizing and voicing their condemnation and demand their governments to do more towards peaceful and equitable solutions. However, this has been met with a strong reaction from European governing bodies. This paper situates this reaction within wider discourses on the European Muslim crisis. It begins with a systematic literature review on the so-called European Muslim crisis, followed by case studies on the United Kingdom and Germany on their respective changes to policies impacting Muslims in the post-October 7 contexa Regarding the literature review, this paper illustrates how this concept has three distinct, yet intersecting meanings: the crisis of European identity; the crisis of foundational ideologies of Europe; and an internal Muslim crisis that often leads to radicalization. Through the British and German case studies, this paper illustrates that October 7 has reinforced and strengthened the shift towards values-based citizenship and integration. This paper argues that through branding pro-Palestine protesters and organizations as extremists in the British context, and adding questions related to antisemitism and Israel in the citizenship tests in the German context, the Israel/Palestine issue has now become yet another yardstick to demarcate the European, civilized “us” vs. the Muslim “other.” In doing so, October 7 has escalated elements already present within the wider discourses of the European Muslim crisis. Full article

Recent studies highlight how body psychotherapy is becoming highly cited, especially in connection with studies on trauma-related disorders. This review highlights the theoretical assumptions and recent points in common with embodied simulation and new sensory theories by integrating bioenergetic analysis, embodiment, and olfactory memory in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) therapy. Embodied memory, rooted in sensorimotor experiences, shapes cognitive functions and emotional responses. Trauma, embodied in somatic experiences, disrupts these processes, leading to symptoms such as chronic pain and dissociation. The literature discussed highlights the impact of burning odors on individuals with PTSD and those who have experienced childhood maltreatment. Burning odors can increase stress and heart rate in war veterans, with sensitivity to these odors intensifying over time since the trauma. Additionally, adults who experienced childhood maltreatment exhibit faster processing of unpleasant odors and increased symptom severity. Grounding techniques, such as adopting a balanced posture, enhance breathing and sensory capabilities, potentially aiding in managing symptoms associated with trauma-related disorders such as PTSD. Full article

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: ‘men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […]’. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier’s sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: ‘it had been revealed to you’, adds Ford, ‘that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford’s use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford’s houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford’s handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of ‘Four Landscapes’ and ‘Certain Interiors’. Full article

This paper addresses the role of the U.S. dollar in fostering global economic growth during the post-war period. The existing literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the true implications of the U.S. dollar’s status as a reserve currency and a dearth of studies examining its impact. In this study, we explore the dynamic long-run and short-run relationships between cross-border U.S. dollar claims, global GDP, and global trade while gauging the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, we use ARDL methodology for a data set that spans the period of 1980 to 2022. The estimation results reveal a robust long-run relationship between U.S. dollar claims, global GDP and global trade and no clear evidence of asymmetric effects. Our findings are of great significance for monetary authorities, emphasising the need for a nuanced understanding of the implications of the U.S. dollar’s conducive role in shaping global economic dynamics and fostering growth. Full article

The actual literature highlights the importance of the socio-cultural context in the development of children. However, there is a lack of specific evidence about the middle East, especially regarding the development of Kurdish children who are living in a post-war scenario, in a country which is experiencing continuous instability due to the different crises. The main aim of this study is to identify the features of the motor development of Kurdish children according to parents’ opinion. A comparison with Italian children is provided as a Western example, which reflects data from the literature. In the study, 331 parents of Kurdish and Italian children aged between 3 and 7 years were involved. Parents filled the questionnaire at kindergartens, after providing consent. The questionnaire was conceptualized, designed, tested and provided ad hoc for this study; it focused on the timing of development, concerning major milestones like head control, sitting and standing-up. The questionnaire consists of 15 questions and has not been standardized yet. A logistic regression showed several differences between Kurdish and Italian children, like head control (p = 0.007) or the manipulation of big objects (p < 0.0001). These results identify the effect of the socio-cultural context and the impact of the growing environment of the child. Moreover, the results of this survey show the need for introducing different adapted, translated and validated assessment tools for motor development, considering differences related to the socio-cultural context. Full article

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. Full article

Following the trauma of the Second World War, Hong Kong, under British governance, enjoyed considerable economic and political freedom to establish a local entertainment industry. Musical films became a major genre of Hong Kong’s film releases in the 1950s. Local melodramas, Hollywood musicals, celebrities, and ideals of female beauty were all present in the growth of Hong Kong musical films, which culminated in a glorious display of cinematic art. This article aims to provide insight into the popularity of Chinese-speaking musical films by examining the social, economic, and political complexity of 1950s Hong Kong, including post-war migration and colonial censorship. An in-depth analysis of Li Han-Hsiang’s The Kingdom and the Beauty demonstrates how Hong Kong studios adapted the Hollywood musical to tell Chinese stories and how Hong Kong musical films incorporated Chinese literature and music to represent cultural memory, local identity, and modern aesthetics. This case study sheds light on the localization of a Hollywood genre and the hybridization of Chinese and Western entertainment forms to appeal to a Chinese audience, thereby broadening the definition of cultural hybridity and informing the practice of Hong Kong’s musical filmmaking. Full article

This paper investigates largely unexplored aspects of the postwar Japanese media industry by tracing the cross-media developments that bloomed from a single poem written by an elementary school girl. Tomo Fusako, a poor elementary school student, wrote the poem “Outage” in 1951 as part of her schoolwork. Tomo’s teacher, Bessho Yasoji, selected Tomo’s work to be published in an original poetry journal featuring children’s writing. Her poems and essays were eventually reprinted in magazines, collected volumes, and even published in textbooks. In 1958, Fujimoto Giichi, an unknown university student at the time, adapted “Outage” into a radio drama and stage play. These works were then further adapted for TV dramas. Children’s essays and poems made for attractive content for the publishing industry and the emerging fields of commercial radio and television media. Fujimoto himself became a famous television host, though it impeded his literary career. Examining Tomo and Fujimoto’s relationship with literary production and media adaptation reveals a cultural world far removed from the literary establishment’s (that is, the bundan’s) view of literature. Full article

This paper examines if incorporating changes in financial market risk perception improves the predictive power of an early-warning system for systemic banking crises. In explaining systemic banking crises, the existing literature identifies inflating stock and real estate bubbles, credit booms, and surges in net capital inflows as the common drivers. Employing panel logit models to predict the postwar systemic banking crises in advanced economies to occur within three–four years, the paper’s key finding is that, even after controlling for the effects of surges in asset and credit markets and net capital inflows that are above the long-run trends for an extended period, market participants’ increasing underestimation of downside risks is a significant predictor of these crises. Incorporating changes in risk perception improves the prediction accuracy of the model significantly. This finding is robust across alternative prediction horizons, systemic crisis definitions, and risk-perception measures. Consistent with the recent theoretical developments in the form of the diagnostic expectations hypothesis for financial markets, the interpretation is that recent recurring good news about financial markets and the broader economic trends for sufficiently long periods lead to growing neglect of tail risks and riskier financial transactions, raising systemic risk and the likelihood of a financial crisis. The finding suggests monitoring financial market risk perception, in addition to the conventional indicators, to predict and avert systemic banking crises. Full article

In several Western European countries, a significant share of social rental housing stock has been sold since the 1980s as part of government policies aimed at promoting homeownership societies. Research has shown that tenure conversion has contributed to increasing socio-spatial segregation of lower-income groups, with diverging spatial patterns of homeownership among immigrants. This paper examines the impact of recent public housing privatization schemes in Milan in relation to micro-segregation and peripheralization processes of foreign populations, which represent distinctive features of immigrant residential distribution in this city. By employing name analysis, an unconventional approach in segregation studies, I inferred the geographical origins of homebuyers and mapped their distribution across the city. The findings reveal divergent purchasing behaviors, whereby Italians predominantly acquire properties in semi-central areas currently undergoing urban regeneration. In contrast, immigrants tend to concentrate their acquisitions in peripheral post-war public housing neighborhoods or in areas predominantly inhabited by residents with similar geographical origins. This paper contributes to the existing literature on ethnic residential segregation in Southern European cities by shedding light on the underexplored role of public housing privatization policies in shaping specific residential patterns and housing outcomes among different groups. Full article