Hazards are taught with the belief that knowing something about their occurrence might help us avoid their consequences. The integrative nature of hazards--physical and social systems bound together--is attractive to the student and the instructor alike. Answering why we teach hazards is fairly straightforward. A more pressing question at present…

Provides an inside perspective on the development of social work education in Hungary during the final years of communism and after the country regained its independence, when there was a strong focus on re-introducing social work and social sciences which had been repressed by the socialist regime in its denial of social problems and thus, its…

Development as an open-systemic phenomenon involves feed-forward processes that guide the organism to face always uncertain future states of its relations with the environment. This creates a major conceptual problem for science--and a practical one for education--its theoretical terms need to capture both the certain and uncertain aspects of the…

The year 2008 marked the 11th anniversary of Hong Kong's return from the UK to the People's Republic of China. In this decade, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government has repeatedly emphasised the importance of the development of national identity and patriotism in school education, and has at the same time introduced diverse…

The focus of the current article is language testing in the context of citizenship and asylum in Estonia, a country that regained independence in 1991. Estonian as the single official language of the country (according to the new language legislation laws) and a new political system have caused changes in use of and attitudes toward Estonian among…

Education was an important part of the identity politics of socialist Yugoslavia, created after the Second World War under Partisan leadership. It has even been suggested that efforts towards nation building in Yugoslavia were carried out mainly through the education system and history education (Diegoli, 2007, 49-50; Hopken, 1997, 82; Wachtel…

Few rape survivors seek help from formal social systems after their assault. The purpose of this study was to examine factors that prevent survivors from seeking help from the legal, medical, and mental health systems and rape crisis centers. In this study, 29 female rape survivors who did not seek any postassault formal help were interviewed…

This article examines whether correlates of cross-national homicide variation tested with data from highly developed, predominantly Western nations could also explain homicide rates in East-Central Europe. Using pooled time-series analyses of data from nine countries from 1990 through 2003, this study found that homicide rates were negatively…

In this paper, we use data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey to analyze the extent to which differences in average attitudes towards immigration across the EU-15 countries may be explained by differences in socioeconomic characteristics and individually perceived consequences of immigration, using an extension of a…

Using data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey, we examine the link between income, reference income and life satisfaction across Western Europe. We find that whilst there is a strong positive relationship between income and life satisfaction, reference or comparison income exerts a strong negative influence. Interestingly, our…

Rock music, rap, and heavy metal are all forms of vulgar music. Vulgarity refers to actions and communication that are "common, noisy, and gross," and are "untranscendent." A technological society is a vulgar society in its base of materialism and exclusive concern with power. Its excessive rationality produces a need for escape, for ecstasy, for…

This article examines Philip Reeve's novel for children, "Mortal Engines", and M.T. Anderson's young adult novel, "Feed", by assessing these dystopias as prototypical texts of what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Through their visions of a fictional future, the two narratives explore the hazards created by contemporary techno-economic progress,…

In October of 2004, the University of Arizona Press published a short volume of Mario Suarez's short stories simply titled "Chicano Sketches." "Chicano Sketches" reflects the elusive nature of the stories themselves. Although Suarez himself probably would have considered his stories "sketches," they are much more…

Prior to Poland's transition from central planning to a market system, which began in 1990, schools of business were non-existent in that country. Instead, university level instruction on economics during the socialist period was closely tied to ideological priorities, and limited to imparting skills suitable for planned economy. All universities…

This dissertation examines the adoption and implementation mechanism of the national e-Governance plan in the regional state of West Bengal in India. The questions that this dissertation seek to illuminate are (i) the various potentials and challenges in integrating the ordinary citizens in the implementation of the national e-Governance plan in…