Month: May 2015
America, Our Home? A Qualitative Study of 1.5 Generation Asian Americans
Background: As the population of Asian immigrants and their children continues to grow in the U.S., it becomes increasingly important to improve our understanding of how these individuals experience growing up and living as Americans. The term 1.5-generation refers to a group of immigrants that is neither first- nor second- generation; these individuals fall in …
Awakening from Dream, Back to the Pre-Modern: Satoh Makoto’s “The Dance of Angels Who Burns Their Own Wings”
Japanese playwright and stage director Satoh Makoto (shows an acute insight that human suffering is the outcome of the illusion of human redemption that has been regarded as an ultimate goal of the linear time-space of the modernity. The linear time-space has killed the existence of God by replacing the multi-layered time-space of the pre-modern …
Re-Heating’ Hope through Recognition in Japanese Late Capitalism: A Sociological Analysis of Ryo Asai’s “The Kirishima Thing”
How is invisible power exerted through recognition? By adopting Ulrich Beck’s social theory of reflexive modernisation, this paper analyses Ryo Asai’s movie, The Kirishima Thing (Kirishima-Bukatsu-Yamerutteyo). Although the movie describes daily life in a high school, the absence of the main character, Kirishima, throughout the entire film leaves it open to various interpretations. This paper …
Positive Disciplinary Power
For decades now, academics have developed analyses for uncovering oppressive forms of power in society. These investigations often reveal conscious and unconscious prejudices lurking behind seemingly innocent and humanistic agendas. Academic research makes power structures operating in a society visible, allowing individuals to understand the ways they are subjugated so that they can resist methods …
An Analysis of Pembayuns Speech Acts in the Sorong Serah Ceremony of Sasak Marriage: A Ritualistic Discourse Study
This study investigated the Pembayuns speech acts in Sorong Serah ceremony of the Sasak marriage. As such, it examined the speech events that occurred within the ritual of the ceremony. It was designed as a descriptive qualitative research of the ethnography of communication type and employed observations and interviews as methods of data collection. Video …
Developing Social Work Practice for People with Disability through Digital Storytelling
The International Federation of Social Workers adopted the new global definition of social work in 2014. Although promotion of social cohesion and respect for diversities was included in the new definition, social work practices for promoting cultural citizenship are still under development in Japan. Since 1990s, community arts organizations in Australia have developed community engagement …
The Empirical Analysis of Tea Price Under the Influence of Wage Earners
This paper pays attention on the variation of tea plantation wage earners from 2006 to 2015. A detailed description on the variation is combined with the changes of weather and annual hot issues. The types of tea are rich, and different tea has different quality standard of fresh leaves picking, especially the famous high-quality tea, …
Community-Based Tourism’s Image Positioning and Strategic Management in Thailand and Lao PDR for Achieving ASEAN Community
This research is a synthesis of knowledge gathering from related researches in the realm of image, management, participation, tourism activities, and strategies of Community Based Tourism(CBT). Also, it includes the ways to develop CBT resources in Thailand and Lao PDR. The research conducted a community survey in some villages where carried on CBT in 4 …
The Dynamics of Indonesia-Malaysia Bilateral Relations Since Independence: Its Impact on Bilateral and Regional Stability
The bilateral relations between Indonesia-Malaysia since the independence of Indonesia can be categorized in three phases. The first is the phase of Soekarno as the first president of Indonesia where his foreign policy towards Malaysia was to confront Malaysia due to his ideology of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Soekarno emerged as the trigger factor of the …
Factors Affecting Malaysia-Singapore Relations during the Mahathir Era
The relationship between Malaysia and Singapore tends to fluctuate from time to time. At times the relation is very good but at other times it seems to be rather fragile. Some terms that have often been used to characterise the relationship are ‘Siamese twins’, ‘sibling rivalry’ and ‘family quarrel’, implying a complex love-hate relationship that …
International Development in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (GMS) and Its Impact on East West Economic Corridor (EWEC)
Following the post-Cold War era, in 1992 the Mekong region countries established an Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the development of their economies, societies and cultures. One of the projects, in the Mekong region The development of East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC) linking with Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, for the purpose of trade, investment and …
Cultural Values in Selected Southeast Asian Countries as Reflected in Representative Short Stories: A Comparative Study
This study reveals the intent of the researcher to investigate the commonalities of cultural values in the community life and lifestyles of some selected Southeast Asian countries based on selected short stories of ASEAN literature. These selections were all written during the period from 1950s – 1990s against a background of profound political, social, and …
Million People March against Pork Barrel Projects: from Potentiality to Actuality
In this paper, we endeavored to ask how virtual reality becomes a public space for advocacies, which call for crowd mobilization in the Philippines. We particularly analyzed the Million People March against pork barrel projects, which happened on August 26, 2013, in Luneta Park, Manila. We also discussed how micro-blogging sites (facebook and twitter) on …
Japan, the Global Novel and the Question of Responsibility
Recent years have seen the arrival of a number of novels, which, while they thematically touch on Japan to some degree, are best situated in a global rather than a national framework. This paper takes four of these novels—Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), Murakami Haruki’s Umibe no …
Hegemonic and Counter-Media Frames of the Unsolved-Past Tragedy
Tempo magazine has brought the memory of the unsolved-past tragedy of Indonesia, “1965/66 Event” in some ways in both New Order era and Reform era. The collapse of New Order has clearly influenced the framing of “1965-Event”. During New Order, the event was remembered as the effort of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to ‘coup d’etat’ …
Political Parties Re-Disconnected? Websites and Social Media of Indonesian Political Parties
Political parties of Indonesia nowadays have created their own websites (Hameed, 2007) in which the patterns of the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) by political parties are much affected by the political and media system (Anstead and Chadwick, 2010; Ward and Gibson, 2010). What are the patterns of Indonesian political parties in utilizing …
Between the Concept of Rights and the Philosophy of Ethics: An Investigation on the Concept of Marriage of Chinese Lesbians
This article examines the issue of how the Chinese citizen makes a choice when a confliction appears between the pursuit towards rights and the obedience to the code of ethics, and compared with the effects of rights concept why the constraint of ethics as a Chinese typical traditional cultural system exerts much more influence on …
Skateboarding Subculture in China: Development Path, Characteristics and Representation of Values and Social Change
Youth subcultures were for a long time located out of the public eye in China. Only over the last 30 years they have been drawing greater popular attention due to their rapid development. The Internet is one of the reasons behind the growth of youth subcultures in China. It constitutes a convenient communication platform to …
Temples: Probing the Possibilities of Economic Regeneration of the Local Communities in Goa
Temples of Goa have played a very vital role as symbols of cultural resistance to the Portuguese hegemony. In the post-liberation era, these temples have been integrated into the national pilgrimage networks and as such receive a large inflow of not only the Goan diaspora, spread far and wide in the country, but also tourists. …
One Nation-Different Fates: Kazakhstan in Pursuit of Cultural Identity
This article provides analysis of experience which modern Kazakhstan went through in process of determination of its own identity and place in the world in midst of rising globalisation. Attempts to restore and safeguard the national identity become common practice in post-soviet countries including Kazakhstan. The transition from soviet identity to its own identity and …
Musical Pedagogy’s Improvement through New Technologies and Musicology: The Ogma Project
What is musical pedagogy? A way to teach someone the technical practice of an instrument? To learn how to express oneself through sounds? Something between these two approaches? We tend to think that this latter assertion is the closest to the truth. We learn how to play music by our countless hours of instrumental practice; …
Moral Aspects of Economic Theories and Present-Day University Curriculum
Contemporary science of economics considers itself to be primarily based on the teachings of the 18th century moral and political philosophers. Yet, the moral aspect of their ideas seems to have been largely ignored, which is probably no longer affordable given the present-day developments in the economic and political life of the civilized world. After …
A Dilemma or Hope for China’s Democratization: A Research on Cyberpolitics Participation of Chinese Citizen Based on Chai Jing Event
This article examines the main characteristics of Chinese cyber-politics participation and reveals the deep reasons behind those characteristics of Chinese cyber-politics participation through a recent heated discussion online on an investigation of the Chinese environmental problem conducted by a Chinese popular journalist Chai Jing. In theory, with the development of internet technique and improvement of …
Who Makes the Garden? (The Comparison Between And Ancient Chinese Documents)
Tachibana Toshitsuna(橘俊纲)，the author of (Records of Garden Making), lived in the middle and later period of Japanese Heian Age. A further understanding of ancient Chinese and Japanese gardens may be acquired through the study of writer and his time, as well as of the comparison between other garden monographs such as (The Craft of Gardens)， …
Implications of the Japanese 2014 Election
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe led his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a landslide victory in the snap election held on December 14, 2014, winning a majority of 291 seats out of 475 in the lower house of Japan’s parliament, the Diet. This success was mainly due to the unpreparedness and general disarray of …
Weaving the Traditions for the Future: Building a Sustainable Support Framework for Iranian Traditional Hand-Woven Textile Arts
Iran has been notably applauded for its luxurious hand-woven textile art of the Persian carpets which has been a tremendous part of Iranian art, heritage and export. However, little attention has been paid to other kinds of Iranian hand-woven textile traditions such as Kaarbafi, Daraibafi and Shaarbafi to name a few both domestically and internationally, …
A Comparative Study of Religious Other-Making and Power between Muslims and Christians at the First Crusade
Religious other-making means to recognize and approve the owning identity or discourse as the ultimate truth based on the negation of the other religious discourse. One of the examples has happened during the crusades. However, the extent of the religious essence’s power in this other-making process among Christians’ and Muslims’ both, based on the theoretical …
Mutual Distrust between China and Japan and the Locked Sino-Japanese Relations
The two giants–Japan and China–in East Asia have been trapped in a negative political relationship for several decades. Even if the normalization of relations was achieved more than forty years ago, the two states have not reached an overall reconciliation. According to the author, it should be the distrust between the two states, which enhanced …
Correlation between types of Personality and Learning Styles of Selected Students of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP): Basis for Learning Enhancement Program
The Polytechnic University of the Philippines, as one of the top universities in the country, has to maintain its competitive edge as regards quality instruction and excellent curricular programs. To be able to do this, the University has to continuously devise programs that would further improve its students learning skills and capabilities. This study is …
Multiple Identities of Media Labourers and Experiences of Creative Autonomy: An Empirical Investigation from a TV Programme Producer’s Perspective
The paper shows that media labourers are likely to form multiple selves throughout their career path, and their perception and experiences towards creative autonomy is strongly related to their multi-dimensional identities. This paper argues that there is a need to establish a balanced concept of creative autonomy that embraces the various facets of creative labourers’ …
Examining Identity Formation of Third Culture Kids through Transnational Engagements
This paper studies the identity formation of Third Culture Kids (TCKs)—who have spent a considerable amount of their childhood and early adulthood living in a host country, and consequently realizing that they have a different worldview (and sense of identity) with their countrymen from their passport country. In this age of migration, not only of …
Archivists to Activists: The Evolving Role of Museum Educators
Traditionally, museums have displayed their collections with a tendency towards a single, authoritative interpretation. Many contemporary museums, however, now design their exhibitions to be approached as a dialogue between artifact and audience, so that the visitor can “complete the meanings of the object-technology interface through their own emotional and experience-based responses” (Andermann and Arnold de-Simine …
Teaching Idiom and Metaphor via Poetry in the Chinese EFL Classroom
I discuss the use of poetry as a vehicle for teaching concepts of idiom and metaphor to EFL students in the Chinese classroom. It is difficult for any learning non-native speaker to understand idiom and metaphor, and the specific difficulties inherent in translating from Chinese to English, and vice-versa, make it such that many students …
Are Women Still Better at Learning Languages? Examining Gender Differences on Learners’ Academic Performance at University
Several past studies (for instance, Steffens & Jelenec: 2011, Heinzmann: 2009) investigated gender stereotypes on language learning at school. They found that girls were better at language learning than boys. Whatever Japanese university students are majoring in, English is one of compulsory subjects for them to complete their degrees. The author of this study is …
The Influence of Gender Role Ideologies in Women’s Careers: A look at Marianismo and Machismo in the Treatment Room
Global statistics document an increase in women’s careers in the professions and portray successful female roles in the industrial, political and financial areas, with some variation in different regions of the world. Nonetheless, women hold only a small percentage of board seats and other influential positions in these areas worldwide. It is also known that …
The Struggle of Waria Buddies to Achieve Symbolic Capital in an Infectious Diseases Intermediate Care Unit in Indonesia
HIV/AIDS is a major health issue that has become the concern of various parties. Infection Diseases Intermediate Care Unit (Unit Pelayanan Intermediet Penyakit Infeksi or UPIPI) is a therapy and treatment unit for people with HIV and AIDS (Orang yang hidup dengan HIV/AIDS (ODHIV)) in Dr. Soetomo teaching hospital, Surabaya, that employed 2 waria(s) (Indonesian …
National and Gender Power Negotiations in Harriett Low’s Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life
Dictated by the cult of domesticity, American women’s status in the mid-19th century remains largely the same from previous centuries: they are powerless politically and socio-economically. Harriett Low, one of the first two American women who lived in Macao in the mid-19th century, is expected to abide by the ideals of the True Womanhood in …
Now the Powerless Speaks: A Study of Bama’s Sangati and Baby Kamble’s ‘The Prisons We Broke’ From a Dalit Feminist Standpoint
In context of the powerful and the powerless in the social formation of India, caste system has been a matter of immense debate and discussion. Continuing for centuries, (presumably from the time of the Aryan invasion) caste system has been a parasitical condition prevailing, thriving and continually reforming, throughout India. Being an Indian one cannot …
“Soledad”: A Depiction of a Filipino Woman’s Chastity as Perceived by Pre-Service Teachers
“Soledad” is a poem written by Angela Manalang-Gloria during a time when the Philippines was steeped in Catholic faith and men ruled the literary arena. The poem is found in Gloria’s only published book titled “Poems” which came out in the 1940s. Gloria was known as a feminist writer during the Philippines pre-colonial years. “Soledad” …
Comparative Analysis of Purchasing Behavior at Physical and Online Bookstores by University Students
This study conducts a comparative experiment on the purchasing behavior of university students at both physical and online bookstores. Recently, the spread of the Internet has changed people’s lifestyles and their purchasing behavior. Given the presence of large online bookstores, this also applies to book purchasing behavior. In particular, this study uses university students – …
An Empirical Study of Cloud Maturity across Industries
The cloud adoption can be regarded as a paragon shift of business transaction, which will accompany with business process reengineering. How do cloud systems be implemented to enhance the business processes across industries? By conducting a empirical survey, this study focuses on the comparison of the cloud adoption across industries in Taiwan. This research project …
Demand on Commodities Contributor of Poverty in Aceh Province: Analyses on Urban Households
Commodities contributor of poverty is dominated by food commodities. Rice and cigarette filter are commodities that contributes a lot to poverty. Other commodities are; fish, electricity and LPG. This study analyzed the demand of urban household for commodities contributor of poverty in Aceh province by using Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) model. Further, this research …
Guidelines for Improving Productivity, Inventory, Turnover Rate, and Level of Defects in the Plastic Industry
The purposes of this study are to study the current situation, opportunity, and obstacle in plastic industry, to create a model for improving the efficiency, reducing level of inventory, turnover, and level of defect. This study used snowball sampling from 20 companies from plastic industry in Thailand. The results found that 18 companies are medium …
Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of Communism: Toward a Symbolic Interactionist Approach to the Study of Corruption in Central and Eastern Europe
Even when the domestic political system has undergone reform, it sometimes seems unlikely that any outside force can introduce enough of a “carrot and stick” approach to persuade a country to maintain momentum. This article is concerned with understanding the cultural peculiarities of fighting corruption and building civil society in Romania, where despite the tough …
Governing International Commercial Contract Law: The Framework of Implementation to Establish the ASEAN Economy Community 2015
The Head of the State Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Summit of Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2007 on Cebu, Manila agreed to accelerate the implementation of ASEAN Economy Community (AEC), which was originally 2020 to 2015. This means that within the next seven months, the people of Indonesia …
Asset Allocation Applying Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO)
Portfolio optimization is an important problem in finance. Its goal is to discover an efficient frontier which shows highest expected return on each level of portfolio variance. The problem has multiple objectives and its search space is large. Multi-objective particle swarm optimization is a multi-objective optimization method, developed from particle swarm optimization by applying non-dominated …
Research on Factors Influencing Job Satisfaction in Labor Relations of New Generation of Migrant Workers in China: The Sample from Tianjin Binhai Development Zone of China
New generation of migrant workers (NGMW) refers to the ones who were born in the countryside from 1980s to 1990s, and as adults then become the labor force in manufacturing or services. NGMW with their individual characteristics is an important component of labor market in China. Based on the previous research review, this paper takes …
Willingness to Pay for Ecotourism Management with Community Participation in Lipe Island, Satun Province
Lipe island, specially the most popular tourist destinations in the southern island, Satun province Thailand. A part of beautiful beaches, crystal clear sea water, deep blue sky various kinds of corals and aquatics animals, there is a group of fishermen who have their own culture local language and identity which are the settle point and …
Exploring Local Movie Markets in the Field of Cultural Democracy and Social Media Practice
Film awards and professional positive film reviews usually suggest a successful film box office. However, that is often not the case when Taiwanese movies are analyzed. This paper analyzes most popular comments collected from social media PTT, one of the most popular Bulletin Board System in Taiwan, to explore how the Internet users can make …
Impact of Financial Reward on Employees’ Commitment in College of Education, Ikere-Ekiti, Ekiti State
The need for increased efficiency has become extremely important in educational institutions like the College of Education, Ikere-Ekiti. In order to bring about staff efficiency, managers must put in place strategies to help workers achieve maximum efficiency on the job. One of such strategies is financial reward. This study therefore examines the impact of financial …
Needs and Health Problems of the Elderly: A Perspective of the Family Care Giver in the Community
Objective: Aging is natural process which unique occurred in the old age population. This study aims to examine the elderly needs and health problems in perspective of the family care givers in the community. Methods: The qualitative study was conducted using the in-depth interview with the family caregiver who experiences to care the elderly for …
Inspecting the Bad Society? Bentham’s Panopticon Revisited
In Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (2008 [1797]), the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham outlined what he perceived to be a model prison, based on the inspection-principle (p. 68). It was centrally about power, the control of miscreants by subjecting them to total visibility. Even more worryingly, he claimed that his model applied equally splendidly to schools, …