Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism Perpetration: An Expansion of the Ecosystem Model.

The sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism (SECTT), also referred to as child sex tourism, involves engaging in sexual activity with someone under the age of 18 in the context of travel and/or tourism. Research on the perpetration of SECTT is vastly underdeveloped. The present review considers the operationalization of SECTT, its prevalence, and existing theoretical models. Existing theory on SECTT provides a good overview of environmental factors that contribute to SECTT, but the model is insufficient in fully accounting for individual-level risk factors related to sexual offending against children. The present paper expands an existing theoretical model of SECTT, the ecosystem model, to account for these individual risk factors and considers their interaction with environmental factors. The paper concludes by highlighting different avenues for future research.

Governance of the wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses: a mixed methods network analysis of transnational organisations, silos, and power dynamics.

INTRODUCTION: The wildlife trade is an important arena for intervention in the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and leading organisations have advocated for more collaborative, multi-sectoral approaches to governance in this area. The aim of this study is to characterise the structure and function of the network of transnational organisations that interact around the governance of wildlife trade for the prevention of emerging zoonoses, and to assess these network characteristics in terms of how they might support or undermine progress on these issues. METHODS: This study used a mixed methods social network analysis of transnational organisations. Data were collected between May 2021 and September 2022. Participants were representatives of transnational organisations involved in the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses. An initial seed sample of participants was purposively recruited through professional networks, and snowball sampling was used to identify additional participants. Quantitative data were collected through an online network survey. Measures of centrality (degree, closeness, and betweenness) were calculated and the network's largest clique was identified and characterised. To understand the extent to which organisations were connected across sectors, homophily by sector was assessed using exponential random graph modelling. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The findings from the quantitative analysis informed the focus of the qualitative analysis. Qualitative data were explored using thematic analysis. RESULTS: Thirty-seven participants completed the network survey and 17 key informants participated in semi-structured interviews. A total of 69 organisations were identified as belonging to this network. Organisations spanned the animal, human, and environmental health sectors, among others including trade, food and agriculture, and crime. Organisation types included inter-governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations, treaty secretariats, research institutions, and network organisations. Participants emphasised the highly inter-sectoral nature of this topic and the importance of inter-sectoral work, and connections were present across existing sectors. However, there were many barriers to effective interaction, particularly conflicting goals and agendas. Power dynamics also shaped relationships between actors, with the human health sector seen as better resourced and more influential, despite having historically lower engagement than the environmental and animal health sectors around the wildlife trade and its role in emerging zoonoses. CONCLUSION: The network of transnational organisations focused on the governance of wildlife trade and the prevention of emerging zoonoses is highly multi-sectoral, but despite progress catalysed by the COVID-19 pandemic, barriers still exist for inter-sectoral interaction and coordination. A One Health approach to governance at this level, which has gained traction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, was shared as a promising mechanism to support a balancing of roles and agendas in this space. However, this must involve agreement around equity, priorities, and clear goal setting to support effective action.

Gendering the beginning of life: Taiwanese gay fathers' navigation of preimplantation genetic diagnosis-assisted sex selection in transnational third-party reproduction.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been used not only to avoid genetic diseases and increase conception success rates but also to perform non-medical sex selection, particularly in the surging cross-border reproductive care (CBRC). In the context of commercialised biomedicine, assisted reproductive technologies, such as lifestyle sex selection, have been tailored to meet intended parents' preferences. However, there is a lack of analysis on how individuals' reproductive decisions on PGD-assisted sex selection were shaped within the sociocultural norms and CBRC. This article explores Taiwanese gay fathers' navigations on sex selection while seeking third-party reproduction overseas because of local legal constraints. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 53 gay fathers (to-be), I analysed how 'individual preferences' were dynamically shaped by local sociocultural norms and embedded within transnational settings of routinising PGD in chosen repro-destinations. The findings showed that gay fathers mobilised strategic discourses on non-medical sex selection from both the local and the global to negotiate their decisions in coherence with their LGBTQ+ identity and their role as sons carrying familial responsibility to procreate male heirs. This article proposed a nuanced understanding of gay fathers' reproductive practices of 'gendering the beginning of life' through PGD-assisted sex selection.

"The real ethernet": The transnational history of global Wi-Fi connectivity.

Wi-Fi is an integral and invaluable part of our media practices. Wireless networks are blended into our media environment and, in terms of infrastructural importance, have become comparable with electricity or water. This article offers a new transnational perspective on the underexplored history of IEEE 802.11 standards by focusing on the tensions between the United States and Europe in terms of development trajectories of wireless technology. The goal is to analyze the standardization of wireless networking through a transnational lens and to contribute to enhanced understanding of the global proliferation of Wi-Fi technology. Four particular aspects of the transnational development of Wi-Fi technology are discussed: the rivalry between US and European standards, the constitutive choice to focus on data transmission, radio spectrum availability, and the peculiarities of network authentication.

From a national elite to the global elite: Possibilities and problems in scaling up.

This research note highlights emerging findings that speak to the challenges of joining the transnational elite, particularly for those coming from the Global South. For a longitudinal study of wealth inheritors becoming more transnational via their educational paths, we spoke with 16 young people who were all in their early 20s and primarily from economic elite families in the Global South. Some participants had clear ambitions, while others were less sure about their future, wondering where they should move and what they should do when they got there. Their various narratives reveal that underlying the possibilities and problems of where to locate themselves was our participants' access to different constellations of economic, social and cultural capital, as well as their race, citizenship and 'home' country's geopolitical situation. Their parents' ambitions that they become part of a global elite remained in most cases largely unfulfilled-despite a significant economic investment in their secondary and university educations. Only a small minority of our participants aspired to and/or were able to secure such transnational futures.

The European Universities initiative: between status hierarchies and inclusion.

Using a dataset of higher education institutional alliances within the framework of the European University initiative (EUi), we test empirically whether the policy-defined goal of a relative balance between excellence and inclusiveness within the scheme has been achieved. Specifically, we provide a descriptive and analytical account of the diversity of the higher education institutions (HEIs) participating in the EUi, the composition of-as well as the mechanisms behind-the formation of individual alliances. We observe that alliance formation activated the deep sociological mechanisms of hierarchisation, with the alliances largely reproducing the existing hierarchy of European HEIs. Specifically, we argue that the global-level stratification hierarchy cast by rankings influences the participation of individual institutions and-although to a more limited extent-the formation/structure of the alliances. Further, we demonstrate that the EUi has strengthened existing ties since most alliances thus far have built on existing forms of collaboration. However, we also show empirically that some of the distinctive policy design measures, namely the requirement for broad geographical coverage and generically framed rules for participation, as well as opening the initiative to new alliances and encouraging enlargement of the existing ones, have generated opportunities for involvement of the lower-status institutions. This broadened the scope of the EUi beyond the core of top-ranked research universities located in the knowledge production centres of Europe. We suggest that these observations may have important implications for how the intended extension of the EUi may be implemented in the future. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-023-01167-w.

"When there is no money, that is when I vomit blood": the domino effect and the unfettered lethal exploitation of Black labor on Dominican sugar plantations.

BACKGROUND: In this article, I utilize the concept of the Plantationocene as an analytical framework to generate a holistic and historical understanding of the present-day struggles of a mostly Haitian migrant workforce on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. METHODS: Inspired by Paul Farmer's methodology, I combine political economy, history, and ethnography approaches to interpret the experiences of sugarcane cutters across historical and contemporary iterations of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial practices over the course of five centuries. RESULTS: My findings elucidate the enduring power of capitalism, implicating corporate and state elites, as the structural scaffolding for acts of racialized violence that condition the life-and-death circumstances of Black laborers on Caribbean plantations to this day. Although today's sugarcane cutters may suffer differently than their enslaved or wage labor ancestors on the plantation, I argue that an unfettered racialized pattern of lethal exploitation is sustained through the structural violence of neoliberalism that links present conditions with the colonial past. CONCLUSIONS: Ultimately, this paper contributes understandings of the plantationocene's enduring effects in the global south by demonstrating how imperialist arrangements of capitalism are not a distant memory from the colonial past but instead are present yet hidden and obscured while relocated and reanimated overseas to countries like the Dominican Republic, where American capitalists still exploit Black bodies for profit and power.

Transnational online education in biochemistry during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Binzhou Medical University: challenges, strategies and outcome.

BACKGROUND: Due to the global outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, schools were forced to shift teaching from face-face to online. During this period, a large number of studies on how to better carry out online teaching emerged. However, these studies were basically conducted with domestic students as teaching objects. The research on transnational online education conducted by overseas students is very limited. METHODS: We first conducted a questionnaire survey on the obstacles of transnational online learning of 64 international students from our school who were staying abroad at the beginning of the fall semester of 2020, analyzed the results using the two-tailed student's t-test and changed the teaching platform accordingly and compared the results of the biochemistry exams conducted for 2018 spring class with those of 2018 fall class and the 2019 fall class, so as to verify the superiority of the DingTalk as a transnational online education platform. RESULTS: The results showed that the main difficulties of overseas students in transnational online learning are poor network conditions and time difference. By using DingTalk as an online teaching platform, these difficulties were overcome. In the spring class of 2018, the results of online study students' biochemistry were significantly lower than those of students in face-face study (t-test, p = 0.01). However, after the switch to the DingTalk platform, online students' results in the 2018 fall class (t-test, p = 0.35) and the 2019 fall class (t-test, p = 0.7) were equivalent to the academic performance of face-face students. CONCLUSION: Our exploration and application of DingTalk software in transnational online education successfully solved the dilemma of overseas students' online learning, and provided a feasible method to guarantee the efficacy of online teaching.

Key dimensions of cities' engagement in the transition to climate neutrality.

Urbanization and the concentration of energy-consuming economic activities make cities responsible for more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, cities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The European Cities Mission launched a call in September 2021 to set out on a path towards "100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030". A very large and diverse sample of 344 candidate cities in 35 countries (a subset of the 362 considered eligible to participate in the Cities Mission) was used to conduct this timely research aimed at identifying the main dimensions on which cities are working to achieve a smart and sustainable transition. The research focused on five main dimensions: local climate planning, climate emergency declarations, participation in networks, international projects and competitions. Results show that only 20 (5.8%) cities have no experience in any of them, while there are 18 (5.2%) cities that have in their background activities that fall under all dimensions. Moreover, networking is the most important dimension, among the five analysed, for cities applying for this Mission, involving 309 cities (approximately 90% of the sample). This is followed by local climate planning, involving 275 cities (80%) and city participation in international projects, involving 152 cities (44%). Cities that have declared a climate emergency are less than a fifth of the sample and are very unevenly distributed in only 37.1% of the countries represented (interestingly, all the UK cities in the sample). Similarly, only 49 cities (14.2%) have received international awards. The results provide insights into the main efforts currently being made by cities to engage in the transition to climate neutrality and may be useful to practitioners, scholars and policy-makers at all levels to improve their knowledge of the steps they need to take to support this process and amplify its scope.

How can Transnational Municipal Networks foster local collaborative governance regimes for environmental management?

While there is abundant literature on Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) and collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) to respond to environmental change, few studies address TMNs as exogenous agents driving CGRs dynamics locally. TMNs have emerged as important actors in multilevel governance, providing formal structures for local governments to share best practices, access funding and influence the international policy arena on global environmental change. We argue that TMNs also have a pivotal role in the activation of CGRs and in strengthening the four dimensions of Capacity for Joint Action (CJA) identified by the literature: structural arrangements, leadership, knowledge and learning, and resources. Through the analysis of empirical evidence, based on semi-structured interviews and data sources (2014-2021), we investigate how TMNs built capacities and facilitated the emergence of a CGR in the case of waste management and composting initiative in Gangtok, India. In this case, two TMNs developed a toolkit to enable the local government to assess climate risks in the context of urbanization, poverty and vulnerability in Asia. Furthermore, at a certain point the local actors started to provide knowledge to the TMNs to be shared among other local governments and activating new CGRs, such as the case of Gangtok, which is active in sharing its knowledge in composting and climate change actions with other cities.

Grandparenting left-behind children in Javanese Migrant-sending villages: Trigenerational care circuits and the negotiation of care.

Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care, depending on the migration and marital status of the parents. The paper emphasizes the often unilateral care-contracts between grandparents and migrant parents, drawing on material primarily from the qualitative interviews of grandparent carers of left-behind children, and the grandchildren themselves. By considering a variety of family contexts in flux as a result of parental migration (mother, father or both parents) and marital dissolution amidst migration, we examine family situations holistically by taking into account the different modes of care provided by grandparents (occasionally in tandem with aunts) within changing care contexts.

Subjectivity as the site of struggle: students' perspectives toward sino-foreign cooperation universities in the era of discursive conflicts.

While students' perspectives are crucial for international/transnational institutions' development, their preferences towards certain values should not be taken for granted, as the possibility of lived experience is confined by individuals' subjectivity, which derives from power and knowledge but does not depend on them (Deleuze; Foucault, 1988). Drawing on empirical data collected from Chinese sino-foreign cooperation universities, this study illustrates how the constructed neoliberal and authoritarian subjectivity influences students' perception towards the enrolled universities, and their struggle in self-examination about what counts as truth, especially privileged by the discursive conflicts. It further argues while such critique to the politically imposed discourses represents the first step for "the care of the self" as Foucault proposes, the students have inevitably confronted the danger of the sense of lost.

Moving towards multipolarity: shifts in the core-periphery structure of international student mobility and world rankings (2000-2019).

Over the past 20 years, international student mobility has experienced a three-fold increase, as planned and emerging education hubs have attracted increasing numbers of students. The appeal of alternative destinations is strengthened by their cultural, linguistic, and geographic proximity, as well as a growing number of internationally ranked universities. This article quantifies shifts in international student mobility and world university rankings over a consequential 20-year period (1999/2000-2018/2019) at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It examines shifts in the number of county-to-country connections (density), relative country importance in the network (centrality), and network structure (multipolarity). The results indicate the overall network density steadily increased year-to-year, with a three-fold increase in the number of country-to-country connections, as influence was more widely and evenly distributed among a larger number of core countries within the network. As the number of universities in planned and emerging destinations listed in the rankings doubled, the network structure indicated a movement toward multipolarity, where a more diverse set of countries exerted greater relative influence in the overall network. The results suggest that while core-periphery dynamics in international student mobility persist, they also have begun to shift, as a larger and more diverse subset of planned and emerging educational hubs in Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East exert increasing influence in the overall network.

Family language policy in retrospect: Narratives of success and failure in an Indian-Iranian transnational family.

In this study, we investigate family language policy in a transnational family through a collaborative autoethnography. Following the theoretical underpinnings of family language policy (Spolsky in J Multiling Multicult Dev 31:3-11, 2012), we present parental language beliefs, management, and practices in retrospect to shine a light on the long-term impact of the family's language policy on their daughter's linguistic development in heritage languages (i.e., Persian and Hindi) and English. The components of the family language policy in this cross-cultural transnational family are sketched in the second author's narratives of her experiences of multilingual childrearing and heritage language maintenance. We engage with, and critique, recent family language scholarship that apply postmodernist lens to examine families' translingual use of languages at home to get by their daily life, showing how having failed to set boundaries between the home/heritage languages and English over the past nine years has resulted in their child's predominant proficiency in English. We argue that such failure has its roots in parents' own past lived, and future imagined, experiences, as well as language ideologies that are polycentric and scaled, the consequences of which concern emotional, linguistic, cultural and social frictions across generations. Drawing on the narratives of success and failure in the family, we call for critical adoption of translingual frameworks in examining family language policy paying careful attention to the long-term impact of such practices at home on children's linguistic development.

Sexology and development.

The history of sexology is a well-established field of scholarly investigation animated by ongoing contestations around the disciplinary boundaries, political outlook, and transnational dimensions of the sexological field. This special issue focuses on the multivalent concept of development to address some of the most pressing questions driving current historiographical conversations in this area. The five articles examine how sexology developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries and explore how sexologists deployed various developmental categories to understand sexuality in different national, geographical, and linguistic spaces, including India, Latin America, and Western and Southern Europe. They show how central tracing the relationship between sexuality and human development became to sexologists' understanding of their project and its value. By interrogating the intersecting individual, social, cultural, and evolutionary developmental frameworks at the heart of sexological knowledge production, the articles engage with sexology as a global and transnational project deeply shaped by ideologies of race, nation, and empire and motivated by a diverse range of political concerns and intellectual questions. In so doing, the special issue as a whole demonstrates the breadth of the sexological field in terms of its interdisciplinary scope, diverse political and intellectual agendas, and global dimensions.

Why and How Should the European Union Defend its Values?

This article provides a normative framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of various defences of European Union (EU) values against their violation in EU member states. This requires, first, a coherent interpretation of EU values as the values of liberal democracy; second, a clear notion of when they are violated; third, a theory of how liberal democracy can be defended with measures that are consistent with the values of liberal democracy themselves; and, finally, a discussion of what the EU's role is in this defence. The article argues that it would be permissible for the EU to combine a number of political, cultural, socio-economic and legal responses in a concentric defence of liberal democracy as long as they respect the separation of powers doctrine and do not rely on problematic notions of collective responsibility.

From "content" to "competence": A cross-cultural analysis of pedagogical praxis in a Chinese science lesson.

This research is based on an approach that looks at cross-cultural research design as a "lens" for a deeper understanding of what goes on in the classroom. The research question is how a cross-cultural study like this one can lead to identifying the cultural script of teaching and help educators reflect on their practice. In this context, Chinese lessons could be described as a case-based study of pedagogical reasoning that drives a shift from focusing on "content" to "competence". This article draws on qualitative data collected by the researchers and a cross-cultural analysis of a science lesson in an elementary school in Beijing, China. Using the Japanese educators' critiques and Chinese reviews, the article determines the cultural script of teaching science (the first research question) and the way Chinese teachers reflect on their practice through the Japanese lens (the second research question). This study exposes the importance of teachers' understanding and reflecting on their practice, technically, practically, and critically. The analysis results show how teachers learn to change their lenses, to reflect on their teaching and reconstruct their understanding about teacher professionalism through at least four basic elements: didactics, praxis, pedagogy, and theory.

Psychology of Transnational Terrorism and Extreme Political Conflict.

Fear of transnational terrorism, along with a revitalization of sectarian nationalism, is sundering social and political consensus across the world. Can psychology help? The focus of this review is on the psychological and related social factors that instigate and sustain violent extremism and polarizing group conflict. I first describe the changing global landscape of transnational terrorism, encompassing mainly violent Islamist revivalism and resurgent racial and ethnic supremacism. Next, I explore the psychosocial nature of the devoted actor and rational actor frameworks, focusing on how sacred values, identity fusion, and social network dynamics motivate and maintain extreme violence. The psychology of the will to fight and die is illustrated in behavioral and brain studies with frontline combatants in Iraq, militant supporters in Morocco, and radicalizing populations in Spain. This is followed by a consideration of how to deal with value-driven conflicts and a discussion of how the Internet and social media encourage the propagation of polarized conflict.

Health Care and Education Access of Transnational Children in Mexico.

Between 2001 and 2018, more than 5.5 million Mexican migrants were removed from the United States or returned to Mexico with their families as immigration enforcement escalated. Learning how this transition affected their children-also referred to as "the invisibles"-is a policy-relevant topic for both the United States and Mexico. Using representative data on 7.6 million Mexican- and U.S.-born children from the 2015 Mexican Intercensal Survey, we provide evidence of the gaps in access to education and health care between these two groups and of the factors potentially responsible for the existing barriers. Relative to children born in Mexico, U.S.-born children are at a considerable disadvantage in terms of health care access, but less so in terms of education. Lack of a Mexican-issued birth certificate is among the persistent factors responsible for the gaps in services. Policies aimed at changing the approach to immigration enforcement in the United States, lessening paperwork requirements in Mexico, and easing access to documentation in both countries could improve transnational children's access to basic services, as well as their present and long-term well-being.

Assessing the health impacts of transnational corporations: a case study of Carlton and United Breweries in Australia.

BACKGROUND: The practices of transnational corporations (TNCs) affect population health through unhealthy products, shaping social determinants of health, or influencing the regulatory structures governing their activities. There has been limited research on community exposures to TNC policies and practices. The aim of this paper was to adapt existing Health Impact Assessment methods that were previously used for both a fast food and an extractives industry corporation in order to assess Carlton and United Breweries (CUB) operations within Australia. CUB is an Australian alcohol company owned by a large transnational corporation Asahi Group Holdings. Data identifying potential impacts were sourced through document analysis, including corporate literature; media analysis, and 12 semi-structured interviews. The data were mapped against a corporate health impact assessment framework which included CUB's political and business practices; products and marketing; workforce, social, environmental and economic conditions; and consumers' adverse health impacts. We also conducted an ecological study for estimating alcohol attributable fractions and burdens of death due to congestive heart disease, diabetes mellitus, stroke, breast cancer, bowel cancer and injury in Australia. Beer attributable fractions and deaths and CUB's share were also estimated. RESULTS: We found both positive and adverse findings of the corporation's operations across all domains. CUB engage in a range of business practices which benefit the community, including sustainability goals and corporate philanthropy, but also negative aspects including from taxation arrangements, marketing practices, and political donations and lobbying which are enabled by a neoliberal regulatory environment. We found adverse health impacts including from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and violence and aggression which disproportionately affect Indigenous and other disadvantaged populations. CONCLUSION: Our research indicates that studying a TNC in a rapidly changing global financialised capitalist economy in a world which is increasingly being managed by TNCs poses methodological and conceptual challenges. It highlights the need and opportunity for future research. The different methods revealed sufficient information to recognise that strong regulatory frameworks are needed to help to avoid or to mediate negative health impacts.