Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019. The 29 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 85 submissions. They deal with foundational research with a clear significance for software science

Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity

This thesis focuses specifically on Walter Benjamin's philosophical insights into the emerging climate of fascism, in Europe, between the two World Wars. These were inseparable from a challenge to modem understandings of history. For Benjamin official histories function to record the spoils of the victors effectively erasing the losing side from the annals of history. This has particular resonance given that Benjamin, a German Jew, was himself under constant threat of cultural erasure during the course of his writing, thus making him in a way the embodiment of a certain constellation of fascist forces. The theme of an 'embodied' fascism will be applied to Benjamin's corpus as well as to other's directly involved and affected by the rise of German fascism. Throughout this thesis I chart the ways in which Benjamin applies alternative methods to reading history, in order to unearth the violence beyond his present situation of fascism. Benjamin argued that violence subtends all modern state function, insofar as its power is won and maintained by the silent suppression of its citizens. Such suppression was the cause of periodic eruptions of violence with society. It was built into the very fibre of what we call civil society as it is generated through culture. This reading of Benjamin hones in on vital areas of modern cultural production such as rhetoric, photography, language, spatiality and communications technology and attempts to situate them within the scope of Benjamin's concerns about violence. In addition to critical theory, my research incorporates the field cultural studies, as Benjamin's main concern was with the ideological role that certain cultural objects played within the social economy in the era that preceded German fascism's consolidation of power. Benjamin's investigations of violence, and its relationship to various technologies at the start of the 20th Century, form an invaluable source of insight with which to evaluate the current critical debates about fascism

Performativity and the Altermodernities: Occupy, Bodies and Time-Spaces

Abstract In the final months of 2010, a new global cycle of protests and social movements emerged that, as the following text willargue, has forced us to critically interrogate and transform the accepted ways in which theorists and researchers perceive the relation between aesthetics and politics, performativity and critical practice, modernity and its presupposed mimetic dynamics between the Global North and the Global South. These protest movements will be examined as various instances of the general category that we can call “the Occupy form.” The following research beginswith an overview of the cycle of struggles and protest that were born out of the global revolutions in 1968. After having provided the salient features of this moment of recent political history, this text moves on to considerations of the performative turn in both the arts as well as in politics, thereby allowing for a broader critique of Modernity and for a conceptualization of what one could call as altermodernities. — a category, which obliges the theorist-researcher to reconceive of the very notion of performativity in the process. The research also defines performative event and its aesthetics in contrast to other existing literature such as social performance theory, and it goes on to argue for an aesthetics whose function is to create the conditions for alternative subjectifications. As performative politics works on the social relations to envision and enact a future society in the present, the transformations in dominant spatio-temporality – a constituent part of relationality – as well as bodies – in-between which the social relationality emerges – will be examined. The processes and mechanisms of constructing and imagining collective bodies at the national level, and how performative politics disrupts such processes of homogenization will be also an important part of evaluating the impacts and effects of occupy movements as well as how these performative movements re-appropriated time and space; creating spatio-temporalities different from the established colonial and authoritarian linear progress-centered ones reproduced by the nation-state apparatuses, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa. It will be also argued that a paradigm of imitation and mimesis will come short of explaining the communication and dissemination of protests movement from Cairo to New York, from Istanbul to Madrid, thus proposing the idea of performative contagion as a model to rethink this communication. Although this research makes use of case studies, archived material, and author led interviews with artist-activists, all of which are related to the main subject of this thesis the occupy form of protests and its predecessors largely remains a theoretical endeavor to use performance and theatre studies in the socio-political field,drawing its insights from the tradition of the philosophers of immanence and the thinkers of community in 20th century

An Analysis of Regional Corporate Injustice, Culture and Accountability

Coal miners’ struggles with black lung disease can be traced to the 1800s. Back then, coal miners fought to make the industry accept that coal mine dust was the culprit behind black lung disease, but they failed. By 1900, some clinicians started recognizing that coal miners suffered from anthracosis or asthma. The miners realized that they could accomplish more if they worked as a team and formed the United Mine Workers of America. They attempted to get compensation for disabled coal miners but failed repeatedly. Their hard work gradually brought about change with the passage of the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act which allowed the government to inspect coal mines, establish safety coal-dust level policies, and compensate sick coal miners. Gaining black lung disease benefits was not as easy as expected. Despite several thousand coal miners applying for black lung disease benefits, only a few thousand received them since the coal companies would mostly appeal benefit award claims for decades until the coal miner and/or his wife gave up or died. After the act was passed, there was a decrease in black lung disease cases until 2000, when the number started to rise again, especially among young coal miners. Many scholars have been looking for an explanation for the sudden increase in black lung disease cases since 2000. Some theorize that the increase was caused by coal mining companies cutting corners and not maintaining safe coal dust levels; the true extent of the problem was unknown because all coal miners do not test themselves for black lung disease. This research uses rational choice theory to analyze the decisions of key players, such as the federal government (Congress and the President), coal miners, black lung disease medical experts, coal mine operators/owners, and appellate courts, to identify patterns in the way their decisions impacted the US Department of Labor’s ability to implement the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (Policy) and the amendments added years later and also determine whether the federal government has properly implemented coal mining safety and health policies in the coal mining industry. The researcher would consider coal mine explosion investigations, criminal and/or civil cases related to coal mine explosions, violations to Environmental Protection Agency policies, and attempts by coal miners, and watchdog and coal mining organizations to obtain monetary damages and/or a judicial order to stop the federal government from issuing a coal mining permit or stop implementing the policies for coal mining federal agencies such as the MSHA. Coal mine explosion investigations and criminal/civil cases began in 2000 and has continued since then. The literature review suggests that the black lung cases among coal miners first noticeably rose in the mid 1990s. This research will answer the following questions: 1. How are the major findings of the mine explosions reports, criminal cases, and civil cases related to the administration of justice? 2. How are the major findings from the mine explosions reports, criminal cases, and civil cases related to the administration of black lung disease benefits? 3. How do the actions of key players (state and federal legislators, coal mining operators/owners, coal miners, and the federal government and federal agencies) possible hinder the US Department of Labor’s ability to implement the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (Policy) and its later amendments? How can it be determined whether the federal government has properly implemented coal mining safety and health policies in the coal mining industry

Education handbook

2002 handbook for the faculty of Educatio