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Since its existence in the 1950s, consumer policy in Germany has been understood and pursued primarily as a bundle of actions and measures initiated and institutionalised by the state. In many cases, the state has also issued corresponding mandates and set up support models, which has created the impression that we are basically dealing with a'consumer policy from above'imposed by macro-politics. Not that there have not been repeated attempts in the past decades to give impetus to consumer policy from the middle of civil society - often in the form of small citizens'initiatives. And in recent years in particular, a number of new consumer organisations have emerged which operate much closer to the grass roots. Nevertheless, the impression seems to have taken root among the large, government-related'players'in the field, who have been in the'business'for decades, not to mention government-internal consumer policy, that consumer policy concerns a policy field that is essentiallyordered by a collaboration of the state on the one hand, and consumer protection organisations representing all consumers equally on the other, while the many small consumer initiatives, not even started by individual committed consumers, regularly fall behind in comparison. This perspective refers largely to the view of and from the centre of politics. This volume is intended to go some way towards countering the institutionally prevailing impression that, in principle, there is only'consumer policy from above'that is really effective and assertive.The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

On a freezing January afternoon in 1992, Deng Xiaoping, China's former paramount leader and now a revered elder statesman, set off on a month long trip around China's south in defence of the reforms he had set in motion to open up China's economy and transform the country into the political and economic powerhouse we know today.In this book Jonathan Chatwin pursues the story of Deng's legendary'Southern Tour'and examines its legacies in the country today. Chatwin recounts the crucial debates and disagreements that characterised Chinese politics in the aftermath of the brutal crackdown of the Tiananmen protests of 1989, and the decisive influence of Deng's journey in establishing an economic blueprint for the 1990s and beyond. He explores a nation which has been transformed by large-scale urbanisation - exemplified by the mega-cities of southern China that Deng visited and endorsed - but whose leadership is now conflicted by the pursuit of wealth that Deng legitimized. Drawing on historical and contemporary eyewitness accounts, and the author's own 3000 mile journey in Deng's footsteps, The Southern Tour brings to life the story of China's transformation into a 21st-century superpower.

This volume examines the progress made by the Chinese military (the People's Liberation Army, PLA) as it strives to meet its commander-in-chief's directive to transform itself into a more capable fighting force.The book tracks the reforms undertaken by the PLA in meeting its commander-in-chief's grand objectives set at the 2015 Central Military Commission Reform Work Meeting: for China's armed forces to transform themselves into a more professional and modern military. Focusing on those changes since late 2016 at corps level and below, the first and second sections of the volume document the subsequent force structure and operational changes to the PLA's four conventional services, and two newly established PLA branches: the Strategic Support Force and Joint Logistic Support Force. To that end, the contributors examine the reforms promulgated by the Chinese high command and measure them against observable developments in the PLA's power-projection capabilities. In view of how the instrumentalization of military power is writ large in Beijing's strategic calculus and in regional hotspot issues, the final part of the book also provides pathbreaking insights into two critical but not so well-understood phenomena: the now regular PLA aerial activities in the Taiwan Strait and the PLA Navy's submarine operations in the South China Sea.This book will be of much interest to students of East Asian security, Chinese politics, and military and strategic studies in general.

A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art'is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions. Organized into three sections, this work first reviews the history and theory of the visual arts since 1980 and introduces readers to the emerging area of scholarship that seeks to place contemporary art in a global framework. The second section traces the progression of recent developments in the art world, focusing on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding efforts to globalize the art world and the visual arts in particular global and transnational frameworks. The final section addresses a wide range of key themes in contemporary art, such as the fundamental institutions and ontologies of art practice, and the interactions among art, politics, and the public sphere. A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, researchers, and general readers interested in exploring global art beyond the traditional Euro-American context.

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara's Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. “I am made from the obsession of detail,” she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother's singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where “everyone is broken, but trying.” A multitudinous witness. Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages—Krio, English, French, poetry's many dialects—to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. “I make myth for peace,” she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means “steadfast and opulent,” and “dangerous and infinite.” She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.But in Besaydoo, there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity—a liberating togetherness sustained by song.

«We often speak of the body of text, and Darian Goldin Stahl's excellent and timely book deals with sister-inspired texts of the body. Stahl makes the case, beautifully and powerfully, for the value of artists'books to open us up (like a laparotomy) to illness experience.» (Paul Crawford, Professor of Health Humanities, University of Nottingham, UK) This book investigates how handmade artists'books excite the senses to communicate lived experiences of illness and disability. The combination of text, image, materials, and form, along with the gesture of turning pages, make artists'books a powerful source of expressive potential. These works of art not only enable patients to create meaning from their medical experiences, but also invite healthcare learners to an uncensored read of critiques on Western medicine. Artists'books are increasingly popular among medical institutions in an age of digital screens because of their intimate handheld, multi-sensory expressions of bodily phenomena that may be difficult or impossible to communicate through words alone. By applying a phenomenological practice of sensing and meaning-making, the author provides step-by-step instructions for creating new artists'books as part of health humanities pedagogies. In this way, Embodied Books serves as a philosophical and pragmatic example of why and how experiencing artists'books in healthcare contexts is so important.