The disrespected state: China’s struggle for recognition through ‘soft power’

This study examines the Western-originated International Relations (IR) concept of Soft Power in the context of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In order to bring more nuance to the particular localised phenomena, the thesis presents three different approaches to the study of soft power: qualitative rhetorical analysis, media analysis and automated sentiment analysis. The results show that soft power is envisioned within the PRC as a political tool for international and domestic use, that the economy is where China has the most soft power potential in Western media, and that the PRC soft power policies are driven by emotions rather than rational calculation, guided by perception of disrespect. The contribution of the study is thus divided into three parts. Firstly, a discourse analysis of relevant Chinese academic journal articles published on the Mainland in Chinese 2000-2015 (n=31) shows that soft power rhetoric aims at national identity formation using such category arguments as ‘Anti-Westernisation’ and ‘cultural security’. In essence, the analysed soft power rhetoric formulates Chinese culture as being under threat from globalisation and Westernisation. Secondly, the study applies media analysis to interpret popular culture produced by the PRC public diplomacy bureaucracy. The results find negative dispositions vis-à-vis ‘self’ and ‘other’, as well as in-group/out-group symbolism in the analysed popular culture texts. Thirdly, to quantify China’s Western media image as part of its soft power push, the study applies an automated dictionary method to analyse two Reuters news article corpora covering the years 1996–1997 and 2008–2009 (n=1,400,000). Using automated content classification, the data is first geocoded into China-, Japan-, South Korea-, Taiwan-, and Hong Kong-related coverage and then further categorised into cultural, political, and economic topics. An automated sentiment analysis is applied to each category to quantify the tendency of the articles. The results emphasise the importance of economy in China related coverage, whereby the assumption of Chinese public diplomacy is not supported: no categorical negative Western media slant against China in comparison to other East Asian regions is found. The study demonstrates that the phenomenon referred to as soft power within the PRC tackles the challenges of modernisation and progress by placing emphasis on cultural safety and national image construction amid the perceived threats of globalisation and Westernisation. This is seen as an answer for the Chinese state in search of national identity, legitimacy and communal acceptance, still struggling with a collective perception of disrespect stemming from historical Western hegemony

You name it?! : Everyday discrimination through accustomed perception of personal names

Based on a social constructivist, pragmatic cognitive understanding of naming, the study investigates the discriminatory hegemonic presuppositions and perceptions that are interpellated with personal names in Germany and Sweden. The critical lens of Black Feminist, Postcolonial, Postmigrant, Critical Trans and Disability Studies is applied in order to deconstruct current and past hegemonic naming norms. By regarding the un/intelligibility of names as constituted by intersecting power relations, racism_genderism_ableism_migratism_ classism, the dispositive model helps to identify what personal names and naming practices are made un/thinkable. Accustoming is introduced as an analytic tool to understand how hegemonic knowledge on naming is acquired and internalized in a structuralist and essentializing way. The analysis of administrative and legislative discourses demonstrates how hegemonic naming norms have been historically and institutionally accustomed. That a personal name is not only determined by institutional but also by individual decision-making is illustrated on the example of the child’s well-being, a commonly used argument for name decisions at registry offices. The feel for language as another norm to justify de_perceived name discrimination is analyzed against the background of how sprachgefühl as an emotive concept interpellates nationalist images of the self and the Other. The final chapter addresses the consequences of discriminatory naming practices: the definition and denial of personhood. The study concludes with a collection of empowering interventions in discriminatory naming practices and recommendations for a contra_ discriminatory anti-structuralist perception of personal names. By employing a transdisciplinary approach, the study illustrates how disciplinary boundaries are transgressed and how different discourse areas and material that traditionally are investigated in law, history, linguistics and literature is integrated in Gender Studies research.Ausgehend von einem sozialkonstruktivistischen, pragmatisch-kognitiven Verständnis von Namen untersucht die Studie die diskriminierenden Wahrnehmungen, die über Personen-namen in Deutschland und Schweden aufgerufen werden. Durch Anwendung der kritischen Theorien und Zugänge der Black Feminist, Postcolonial, Postmigrant, Trans und Disability Studies auf Namensdiskurse werden gegenwärtige sowie historische hegemoniale Normen dekonstruiert. Mit Hilfe des durch intersektionale Machtverhältnisse konstituierten Dispositivmodells wird die Intelligibilität von Personennamen zur Diskussion gestellt. Vergewohnheitung (accustoming) als neues analytisches Konzept macht nachvollziehbar, wie hegemoniales Wissen zu Namensgebung auf strukturalistische und essentialisierende Weise erworben und internalisiert wird. Die Analyse administrativer und legislativer Diskurse zeigt, wie hegemoniale Namensnormen historisch und institutionell vergewohnheitet wurden. Dass ein Personenname institutionell auch durch individuelle Wahrnehmung bestimmt wird, illustriert die Analyse des ‚Kindeswohl‘, einem zentralen Argument für Namensentscheidungen auf Standesämtern. Ein weiteres Beispiel für die Rechtfertigung ent_wahrgenommener diskriminierender Namenspraktiken ist das Sprachgefühlkonzept, dessen Verwendung daraufhin untersucht wird, inwiefern es nationalistische Vorstellungen des Eigenen und des Anderen aufruft. Schließlich wird die An- und Aberkennung von Menschsein als Konsequenz diskriminierender Namenshandlungen adressiert. Eine Sammlung empowernder Interventionen in diskriminierende Namenspraktiken sowie Empfehlungen für eine kontra_diskriminierende, antistrukturalistische Wahrnehmung von Personennamen runden die Studie ab. Mit ihrem transdisziplinären Ansatz veranschaulicht die Arbeit, wie disziplinäre Grenzen überschritten und Diskursfelder und -materialien, die traditionellerweise in den Rechts-, Geschichts-, Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften analysiert werden, in die Genderforschung integriert werden können

Conception basée modèle des systèmes temps réel et distribués

Les systèmes temps réel et distribués posent des problèmes complexes en termes de conception d'architecture et de description de comportements. De par leur criticité en vies humaines et leurs coûts de prototypage, ces systèmes ont motivé le développement d'une activité de recherche sur les langages de modélisation formelle et les techniques de validation basées modèle qui contribuent à la détection au plus tôt des erreurs de conception. Néanmoins, les langages formels ont eu un succès plus que limité dans l'industrie. L'arrivée du langage UML (Unified Modeling Language) a ouvert de nouveaux horizons pour l'intégration de langages de modélisation formelle dans une méthodologie de conception susceptible d'être mieux acceptée par les praticiens du domaine. En s'appuyant sur une expérience antérieure de la technique de description formelle Estelle et des extensions temporelles des réseaux de Petri, notre activité de recherche sur les cinq dernières années a débouché sur la production d'un profil UML nommé TURTLE (Timed UML and RT-LOTOS Environment). TURTLE surpasse UML 2.0 par ses extensions aux diagrammes d'analyse et de conception UML, sa sémantique formelle exprimée en RT-LOTOS, et ses outils de support (éditeur de diagrammes et outil de validation formelle combinant simulation et vérification basée sur une analyse d'accessibilité). La méthodologie TURTLE trouve son champ d'application naturel dans la conception de systèmes temps réel et la validation d'architectures de communication en particulier. L'approche proposée a été appliquée avec succès à des systèmes satellitaires et des protocoles d'authentification

Trends in Automotive Communication Systems

http://www.ieee.org/International audienceThe use of networks for communications between the Electronic Control Units (ECU) of a vehicle in production cars dates from the beginning of the 90s. The specific requirements of the different car domains have led to the development of a large number of automotive networks such as LIN, J1850, CAN, TTP/C, FlexRay, MOST, IDB1394, etc.. This paper first introduces the context of in-vehicle embedded systems and, in particular, the requirements imposed on the communication systems. Then, a comprehensive review of the most widely used, as well as the emerging automotive networks is given. Next, the current efforts of the automotive industry on middleware technologies, which may be of great help in mastering the heterogeneity, are reviewed. Finally, we highlight future trends in the development of automotive communication systems

CABS: a case-based and graphical requirements capture, formalisation and verification system

The use of formal specifications based on varieties of mathematical logic is becoming common in the process of designing and implementing safety critical systems and practices for hardware design. Formal methods are usually intended to include in the specification, all the important details of the final system in the specification, with the aim of proving that the specification possesses certain properties and lacks other unwanted properties. In large, complex systems, this task requires sophisticated theorem proving, which can be difficult and complicated. Telecommunications systems are large and complex, making detailed formal specification impractical given current technology. However, formal “sketches” of the behaviours the services provide can be produced, and these can be very helpful in locating which service might be relevant to a given problem.This thesis describes CABS, a case-based approach that uses coarse-grained graphical requirements specification sketches, to outline the basic behaviour of the system's func­tional modules (called services), thereby allowing us to identify, re-use and adapt re­quirements (from cases stored in a library), to construct new cases. The matching algorithm identifies similar behaviour between the input examples and the cases stored in the case library. By using cases that have already been tested, integrated and im ­plemented, less effort is needed to produce requirements specifications on a large scale. Using a hypothetical telecommunications system as an example, it will be shown that a comparatively simple logic can be used to capture coarse-grained behaviour and how a case-based approach benefits from this. The input from the examples is used both to identify the cases whose behaviour corresponds most closely to the designer's intentions, and also in the process of adapting, validating and, finally, verifying the proposed solution against the examples