YorkSpace
YorkSpace is York University's Institutional Repository. It supports York University's Senate Policy on Open Access by providing York community members with a place to preserve their research online in an institutional context.
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- Previously Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES)
- The Global Labour Research Centre (GLRC) engages in the study of work, employment and labour in the context of a constantly changing global economy.
- Lives Outside the Lines: a Symposium in Honour of Marlene Kadar
- Used only for SWORD Deposit by Adminstrator
- Welcome to WILAA, a gathering place for materials related to research projects that explore work-integrated learning and disability-related accessibility and accommodations.
Recent Submissions
A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires
(2024) Fix, Blair
When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution. For example, if you buy a new car that’s twice as efficient as your old one, it should cut your gasoline use in half. And if your new computer is four times more efficient than your last one, it should cut your computer’s electric bill fourfold.
In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1
Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.
Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.
Instead, we took these efficiency gains and invested them in technological sprawl. We took more efficient computer chips and put them in everything — phones, TVs, cars, fridges, light bulbs, toasters … not to mention data centers. So rather than spur conservation, more efficient computers catalyzed the consumption of more energy.
In this regard, computers are not alone. As you’ll see, efficiency backfire seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Far from delivering a cure for our sustainability woes, efficiency gains appear to be a root driver of the over-consumption disease.
Key points on Bichler/Nitzan’s text “Capital as Power”
(2024) Szepanski, Achim
FROM THE ARTICLE: At first glance, it would appear that Deleuze’s concept of structure involves a complex form of so-called creorder, a term that appears at the forefront of the methodological findings of the economists Bichler/Nitzan. If the structure is actualized in each of its moments in processes, then Bichler/Nitzan describe this process with the term “creorder”. They consider this to be a highly artificial term, which is intended to indicate that a structure/order must constantly construct and reconstruct itself in (historical) time, just as a form must constantly transform itself. According to Bichler/Nitzan, in the context of creorder, the meaning of the relationship between Heraclitean becoming and Parmenidean being lies precisely in the fact that the fusion of verb and noun results in the term “creorder”: “To have a history is to create order – a verb and a noun whose fusion yields the verb-noun creorder.” On the one hand, the so-called creorder may be completely vertically or hierarchically ordered, as is the case in ultra-bureaucratic systems, for example; on the other hand, it may also be horizontal, as could be the case in radical democracies, or it may be in between order and disorder.
Traces of Kinship Care: Preliminary Findings From Nansen Passport Holders’ Documents in the League of Nations and Arolsen Archives
(International Migration Review, 2024-03-04) Tames, Ismee
This article offers a new perspective on a body of literature that has been growing since the modern concept of “statelessness” became a pressing concern of diplomats and the displaced alike more than a century ago: it studies the “voices” of the stateless as captured in the archival documents of the organizations designed to deal with refugees through the lens of family and kinship care. This will help us to gain an understanding of how stateless refugees and the officials, administrators and humanitarians who assisted them navigated and negotiated the kinds of care requested, needed, withheld, or provided, and that have been captured in the documents coming out of these processes. By positioning care as relational and embedded within historical documents, this contribution offers glimpses of the physical remnants of the processes that took shape between the various actors. From these explorations, it follows that the distinction between anonymous care, as provided by humanitarian or state organizations, and personal care may not have been so clear-cut: sometimes helpers and those being helped turn out both to be Nansen passport holders. The focus on family and kin moreover allows to move beyond the institutional focus on individuals and to understand statelessness and displacement as an experience of families and communities instead.
UCLA PTSD reaction index for DSM-5 (PTSD-RI-5): a psychometric study of adolescents sampled from communities in eleven countries
(European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2019-05-07) Đorić, Ana; Stevanovic, Dejan; Stupar, Dusko; Vostanis, Panos; Atilola, Olayinka; Moreira, Paulo; Dodig-Curkovic, Katarina; Franic, Tomislav; Davidovic, Vrljicak; Avicenna, Mohamad; NOOR, ISA MULTAZAM; NUSSBAUM, LAURA; thabet, abdelaziz; UBALDE, DINO; Petrov, Petar; Deljkovic, Azra; Campos, Luis Antonio Monteiro; Ribas, Adriana; Oliveira, Joana; Knez, Rajna
Background: Children and adolescents are often exposed to traumatic events, which may lead to the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is therefore important for clinicians to screen for potential symptoms that can be signs of PTSD onset. PTSD in youth is a worldwide problem, thus congruent screening tools in various languages are needed.
Objective: The aim of this study was to test the general psychometric properties of the Traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Index for children and adolescents (UCLA PTSD) Reaction Index for DSM-5 (PTSD-RI-5) in adolescents, a self-report instrument intended to screen for trauma exposure and assess PTSD symptoms.
Method: Data was collected from 4201 adolescents in communities within eleven countries worldwide (i.e. Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Indonesia, Montenegro, Nigeria, Palestine-Gaza, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, and Serbia). Internal consistency, discriminant validity, and a confirmatory factor analysis of a four-factor model representing the main DSM-5 symptoms of the PTSD-RI-5 were evaluated.
Results: The PTSD-RI-5 total score for the entire sample shows very good reliability (α = .92) as well as across all countries included (α ranged from .90 to .94). The correlations between anxiety/depressive symptoms and the PTSD-RI-5 scores were below .70 indicating on good discriminant validity. The four-factor structure of the scale was confirmed for the total sample and data from six countries. The standardized regression weights for all items varied markedly across the countries. The lack of a common acceptable model across all countries prevented us from direct testing of cross-cultural measurement invariance.
Conclusions: The four-factor structure of the PTSD-RI-5 likely represents the core PTSD symptoms as proposed by the DSM-5 criteria, but there could be items interpreted in a conceptually different manner by adolescents from different cultural/regional backgrounds and future cross-cultural evaluations need to consider this finding.
Development of a multi-component intervention to promote sleep in older persons with dementia transitioning from hospital to home
(International Journal of Older People Nursing, 2022-04-01) sidani, souraya; Fox, Mary; Butler, Jeffrey; Maimets, Ilo-Katryn
Background and objectives: Hospitalized older persons with dementia are commonly discharged with intensified sleep disturbances. These disturbances can impede the recovery process. Nurses are well-positioned to assist persons with dementia and their family caregivers in managing sleep disturbances during the transition from hospital to home. In this paper, we describe the development of a multi-component intervention to promote sleep.
Research design and methods: We applied three stages of the intervention mapping method to develop a non-pharmacological, multi-component sleep intervention. The first stage involved a review of the literature to generate an understanding of the determinants of sleep disturbances experienced by persons with dementia in hospital and home settings. The second stage consisted of a literature review to identify therapies for managing commonly reported determinants of sleep disturbances. The third stage entailed delineation of the intervention components.
Results: The most common determinants of sleep disturbances experienced by persons with dementia in hospital and home settings were: physiological changes associated with aging, sleep environments non-conducive to sleep, limited exposure to light and engagement in physical activity, stress, and sleep-related beliefs and behaviors. Therapies found effective included: light therapy, physical activity therapy, sleep hygiene, and stimulus control therapy. These therapies were integrated into a multi-component sleep intervention to be provided using the teach-back technique, during and following hospitalization.
Discussion and implications: Consistent with the principles of patient engagement, the multi-component sleep intervention will be evaluated for its acceptability and feasibility.