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This research was carried out in response to the need to find new alternative ways of maintaining public lighting with high pressure sodium vapor lamps. The objective was to develop a public lighting maintenance management system based on fuzzy logic that guarantees maximum energy efficiency and is economically feasible.

A preliminary study was carried out on the complaints due to failures of public lighting for three years in the municipality of Camagüey, Cuba, determining the failure rate of each control and the time between failures, a statistical evaluation of the time between failures was carried out identifying that this variable responds to a Weibull distribution, the membership functions of the proposed four linguistic variables and the rule base for their fuzzy sets were created, obtaining as output linguistic variable the mass replacement and cleaning time.

The fuzzy logic maintenance model developed is effective in making better use of the useful life of high-pressure sodium vapor lamps, increasing the time between maintenance operations of mass lamp replacement and mass cleaning of luminaires up to 8 and 9 years, without compromising the required lighting levels and energy efficiency.

The literature contains very few references to the use of condition-based maintenance in this type of system, so a novel approach by a robust heuristic model of street lighting condition-based maintenance management driven by data is proposed, the model integrates through fuzzy logic all the factors that influence the progressive deterioration of these installations and maintenance actions that guarantee compliance with the established service quality standards, with the maximum energy efficiency that is economically justified.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how States may counter economic sanctions in line with international law, using the European Union’s (EU) evolving approach as an illustration. After elaborating on the concept of economic sanctions and their political and economic background, this study addresses their legality under international law. On this basis, this paper reflects on the two main EU measures to counter extraterritorial sanctions: the blocking statute and countermeasures.

Methodologically, this paper combines doctrinal analysis with research from political science and economics.

This paper finds that blocking statutes represent a more cautious approach, whereas countermeasures constitute a more assertive reaction to extraterritorial sanctions. However, both measures remain second-best options in the absence of a compulsory global international dispute settlement system.

This paper contributes to the literature by offering a novel comparison of blocking statutes and countermeasures.

With a growing preference for active, authentic, and cultural experiences over traditional ones, creative tourism has garnered significant academic interest. This study offers a comprehensive review of creative tourism research, delineating its evolution, prominent contributors, pivotal areas, and prospective trajectories through a bibliometric analysis.

Employing a bibliometric analysis using the biblioshiny and VOSviewer software, this study systematically reviews 198 articles on creative tourism identified and retrieved from the Scopus database.

A notable increase in creative tourism research is witnessed in recent times, with Portugal and the Netherlands leading in publications and citations, respectively. This review also pinpoints key authors, countries, institutions, and journals shaping the field, and presents emerging themes such as authenticity and creative experience, culture and heritage, urban and rural contexts, and co-creation in creative tourism.

Identifying core research contributors (authors, countries, institutions, journals) and contributions (themes, topics) assists academics in seeking collaborations and shaping future research. Practitioners are advised to adapt these trends (authenticity, co-creation, sustainability) into their strategic planning to meet market demands.

This study offers a seminal review of creative tourism through a bibliometric analysis, a technique that leverages the power of technology (data, software) to engage in retrospection and projection—the hallmark of benchmarking studies across fields, including tourism. Noteworthily, this study provides a detailed summary of the field’s trajectory and significant trends, positioning itself as an essential reference for academic scholars, industry professionals, and policymakers with a keen interest in creative tourism.

The present chapter deals with the study of art and its visual code through the hegemonic ideology of capitalism in Yugoslavia, one of the founding countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. It explores the ways in which the visual code of non-alignment confronts the hegemonic code of capitalism and how art changed depending on the conditions in which it was created after the Second World War, in the period characterised by a bipolar world, which, however, also saw the emergence of the ‘third way of non-alignment’ in the 1960s. In the era of decolonial political shifts, political emancipation and the emergence of numerous new political entities, the colonial past could not be escaped; it moved to other levels of new forms of colonialism. The chapter is based on the thesis that the observed period is characterised by the transposing of colonialism to the cultural and visual sphere. Drawing on the examples of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts and gallery policies in Ljubljana, we aim to understand the extent of cultural imperialism in the context of non-aligned socialist Yugoslavia. The study of the forms of modernism present in the area at that time reveals what modernism conveyed and how the main transmissions of capitalist values took place through modernist trends.

The home-is-safer-than-abroad bias is quite substantial in tourism. In times of uncertainty, home-like, domestic, and what is known is much more trusted. This paper explores how the diaspora population might be instrumental in rebuilding medical tourism for countries with migration-intense populations.

Theory-based adaptation leading to the shift of perspective in medical tourism. Scientific evidence, international organisation reports and media outlets’ publications were analysed. This work is a continuity of ongoing diasporic medical tourism (DMT) research.

Diasporic medical tourism represents a group of “hidden consumers” that pioneered medical tourism in certain countries. They are non-negligent in volume, continue to travel to visit friends and relatives (VFR tourism category) despite economic and societal upheavals, and often follow a “home-is-safer-than-abroad” bias. Therefore, they represent a substantial group of potential consumers, especially in times of uncertainty.

Medical tourism has become very competitive. Countries and companies need to look for post-pandemic consumers’ new behaviours and new avenues to develop medical tourism.

Despite the diaspora being even a majority of medical travellers in certain countries, this sub-segment has not been adequately addressed in academia. This paper highlights the importance of DMT in uncertain times (post-pandemics, fragile economic environment) and the opportunities and constraints it presents, thus addressing a critical gap in the literature.

The rapidly growing medical tourism sector impacts sending and receiving countries’ health systems. It is growing rapidly, and medical procedures, technology and high-quality healthcare are expensive and unequal. Low-to-middle-income countries’ citizens travel abroad for better healthcare for cost or other reasons. Medical tourism in developing countries is poorly understood, despite empirical studies from developed countries and various disciplines. This paper aims to analyze the motivational factors that influence Nepalese patients’ decisions to seek outbound medical tourism in Nepal.

The study adopted a quantitative approach. The study purposefully included individual patients who had undergone medical treatment abroad to form the sample for research purposes. Among the 400 respondents, 382 responses were deemed the final sample size. A questionnaire was developed on a seven-point Likert scale. The study proceeded with a sequential analysis approach, commencing with the evaluation of the measurement model before conducting path analysis to test the hypotheses and present the model estimates.

The study found that the individuals supported outbound medical tourism and were open to medical treatment abroad. Outbound medical tourism is highly related to service quality and word-of-mouth communication along with the insurance policy, language and culture, treatment cost and procedural safety. However, service quality and word-of-mouth communication significantly affect outbound medical tourism, with service quality having a large effect. These findings of the study shed a different dynamics of the factors influencing Nepalese individuals’ decision regarding outbound medical tourism.

This study focuses to a developing country in which the country’s healthcare system lacks proper infrastructure and services, is overcrowded, lacks expertise and technology and private hospitals are scarce. As a result, more people are seeking treatment across borders. Though researchers from developed countries and different disciplines have carried out empirical studies on medical tourism, little is known about this phenomenon in developing countries. Therefore, this study explores the motivational factors for outbound medical tourism in Nepal. This study addresses these key research issues to highlight Nepal’s underexplored outbound medical tourism and its drivers.

This paper is a scoping review that aims to explore the scientific evidence in relation to employment discrimination suffered by LGTBIQ+ migrants.

Following a search in the electronic databases PsycINFO, SCOPUS and WOS, 89 studies were obtained. It has been conducted using PRISMA protocol and applied to an initial corpus of 89 academic texts. Having implemented the suitability, screening and inclusion criteria, this corpus was refined to a sample of four articles. These were evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Institute tools.

Despite the scarce scientific evidence on the subject, we can affirm that power dynamics place migrant LGTBIQ+ people in a clearly disadvantaged position with regard to labour integration. The simultaneous ascription to the multiple groups analysed entails the experience of facing double or triple discrimination.

The review highlights the need for more research on LGTBIQ+ migrant issues across various contexts and sectors. It suggests detailed analysis of homophobia and homophilia in different areas, visibility of good practices and exploration of coping strategies like de-transitioning. The sample of people investigated could be extended to other acronyms of the collective. Scaling up research would also be useful to compensate for the methodological limitations of the studies. For example, the hypothesis that the cultural sector is more inclusive with real job offers could be taken up.

The review highlights the need for comprehensive policy interventions to prevent stigmatisation, ensure healthcare access and recognize the rights of marginalized populations. It calls for intersectional approaches in employment and migration policies to address multiple oppressions faced by LGTBIQ+ migrants. The review also recommends revising foreigner regulations to reduce barriers for refugees, ensuring cultural and gender diversity in transit spaces and reinforcing anti-discrimination legislation to guarantee rights and reduce social exclusion. In addition, it would be advisable to reduce waiting times for the resolution of applications and ensure that spaces they are forced to transit are favourable to gender diversity.

The review emphasizes the importance of awareness-raising strategies to counteract exclusionary narratives and promote empathy towards LGTBIQ+ migrants. It advocates for training resources for healthcare, legal professionals and civil servants and inclusion programmes in workplaces. It suggests following principles of new narratives to foster inclusive perceptions and safe spaces and calls for institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion to challenge discrimination and hierarchical exclusion structures.

It is necessary to approach this phenomenon through the prism of intersectionality in order to understand it and to develop appropriate intervention strategies and policy formulation leading to the eradication of discrimination and the reduction of inequalities in the work environment.

The objective of this study is to verify the role of national mechanisms of social empowerment in driving the development of the multidimensional nature of absorptive capacity at the national level, as a way of fostering innovation and economic prosperity for Latin American countries.

This research encompasses the 20 countries that make up the Latin American region. A Tobit model was used with censored data, in a panel format. The adoption of this model was necessary due to the characteristic of the dependent variable (national absorptive capacity) being an index that varies in the range of 1 to 7. The time horizon covers the period from 2006 to 2021.

The results show that the degree of economic development, institutions and locally developed innovation are the mechanisms for generating the multidimensional nature of the absorptive capacity of Latin American countries. The innovative base of the countries was the most significant variable and the biggest parameter to explain this relationship. This means that given the preexisting innovative capacity of these countries, it is possible to stimulate and increase the national absorptive capacity through this mechanism.

The originality of this article consists in analyzing the national mechanisms of social empowerment in the development of the multidimensional nature of absorptive capacity, which allows us to verify all the sources of absorptive capacity creation that can be transformed into innovation.

This paper explores the concept of information precarity, tracing some of its foundations to microaggressions and systemic injustices experienced by marginalized populations over time as race-based trauma, which functions as a mediating mechanism affecting the information practices of individuals and communities.

We describe the conceptual background of information precarity, information practices, microaggressions and race-based trauma, then illustrate these concepts through interviews and focus groups from a network of people and organizations helping a Latinx community navigate the COVID crisis.

The conceptual framework connecting information precarity with microaggressions and race-based trauma provides context and explanation for the information practices of marginalized communities living in information precarity.

The study primarily explored adverse experiences such as microaggressions, which means that instances where Latinx individuals successfully navigated systemic barriers should be further explored. The study is based on the lived experiences of a specific group of Latinx individuals from a particular geographic area. Thus, findings may not be generalizable to all Latinx populations or other marginalized groups. This study’s findings suggest that efforts to improve information access must go beyond providing resources or making more policies. We recommend actions. Recognizing that race-based trauma affects how people engage with information highlights the importance of building and maintaining trust with marginalized communities.

In this study, we suggest actions. Recognizing that race-based trauma affects how people engage with information highlights the importance of building and maintaining trust with marginalized communities. Culturally sensitive outreach strategies such as support networks, community advisory boards, cultural liaisons or information brokers are crucial. Institutions can and should create environments where individuals feel safe to seek and share information with more personalized or community-specific approaches and a long-term commitment to information accessibility.

First, it illustrates the mechanisms through which precarity persists by showing how microaggressions are a systemic barrier that significantly shapes information practices and perpetuates vulnerability. Second, we demonstrated that race-based trauma is a mediating factor in information precarity, highlighting how racism emerges tangibly in everyday interactions as a mediating factor in information practices. Third, we show that information precarity, mediated by race-based trauma, can result in an information practice of avoidance as a protective mechanism to steer clear of unfair treatment and racist behavior.

This paper aims to draw attention to the global infringement of reproductive rights of Indigenous and racialised Peoples.

Narrative literature review. Description and comparative analysis of examples of forced sterilisation.

Large-scale sterilisation campaigns were identified in three different regions of the world: North America, Latin America and Europe. Within these, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous and racialised Peoples have been forcibly sterilised as part of state-sponsored procedures, predominantly aimed at women and gestating people. These abuses are continuing in the 21st century and have origins in “racial science” theory. The exact nature of the abuses is identified alongside the long-term health and wellbeing implications. Professional attitudes and behaviours that condoned such practices within healthcare settings are identified. The psychological, social and cultural impact of such practices, including on Indigenous body sovereignty and self-determination, are demonstrated.

These are twofold: firstly to eradicate any future practice of forced sterilisation and secondly to provide reparations to those affected.

The analysis brings together scholarship from Indigenous studies alongside that of health and social sciences.