On Walking While Confined

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020No aparente paradoxo que a ideia de “caminhar em confinamento” encerra — também na sua relação com a cidade — encontrámos, na experiência de confinamento, algumas possibilidades de operar nessa tensão paradoxal. Serão hipóteses de potência coreopolítica, se postas em oposição à sensação de auto-corepoliciamento (a autovigilância do próprio movimento) e à extrema atenção dada ao movimento do “outro” como ameaça, que pode ser transformado numa proposta de jogo social. In the apparent paradox that the idea of “walking in confinement” contains — also in its relationship with the city — we have found, in the confinement experience, some possibilities of operating in this paradoxical tension. These will be hypotheses of choreopolitical potency, if put in opposition to the sensation of self-chorepolicing (the self-monitoring of one’s own movement) — and to the extreme attention given to the movement of the “other” as a danger - which can be transformed into propositions for social play.publishersversionpublishe

Performing Paradise in the Early Christian Baptistery: Art, Liturgy, and the Transformation of Vision

Images representing paradise were some of the most pervasive in Early Christian churches throughout the Mediterranean from approximately the fourth to sixth centuries, but it was only through the baptistery and its attendant rituals that the Christian initiate entered the faith community and had subsequent access to the pictorial cycles within the church interior. The baptistery was both the actual and metaphysical gateway for Christian initiates entering the Church, understood symbolically as the body of Christ and physically as the primary location of Christian cult adjacent to the baptistery. The role of paradise within that space, therefore, offers unique insight into the trajectory of Early Christian beliefs in salvation, as well as the threshold of earthly and heavenly existence that Christian initiates were thought to inhabit within baptismal space. Baptistery research has surged in the last fifteen years, but the focus has been primarily architectural and typological. This dissertation shifts the discussion toward a more theoretical context for understanding how visions of paradise were constructed in Christianity’s central induction ritual. The dissertation examines the pictorial, material, and liturgical strategies employed in Early Christian baptisteries of the Mediterranean to recreate paradise sensorially. The experience of paradise not only transformed baptismal initiates into new Adams and Eves reenacting the fall of humanity upon an Edenic stage, but it also facilitated the transformation of the carnal senses into spiritual perception, deemed necessary for physical bodies occupying a liminal space that was thought to unify terrestrial and celestial realities. I examine the development and transmission of paradisiacal motifs and strategies of vision and the manipulation of sensory experience in the baptisteries of Italy, North Africa, and the southwestern Balkans, pairing them with contemporary theories of performative space and late-antique discourse on sensory perception

Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies : Plenary Papers

Implementing the decision of the General Assembly of the AIE B (Athens 2013), the Organizing Committee of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Belgrade August 2016) has introduced certain changes which seemed necessary with regard to the programme and format of the plenary sessions. The aim of these changes was to find room for discussion during the sessions themselves. Each session now includes three lectures on a common topic and is moderated by a chairperson whose main task will be to facilitate the discussion among the speakers as well as between them and the public. The chosen topics were selected as representative of certain subfields of particular interest within the present state of Byzantine studies. The last session is devoted to the future of Byzantine studies, characterized by a new dynamics in terms both of expansion and of the techniques of research. The present volume contains twenty papers to be given at the plenary sessions, together with the respective introductions and conclusions. In the introduction to each session, the moderators offer their view of the current state of the field, thus providing the necessary scholarly background for the following lectures and the ensuing discussion. The topics selected belong to different subfields: hagiography, the archeology of early Byzantine towns, the study of religious practices and the senses, the inquiry into the political and ideological influence of the idea of Romanitas among the Slavs, the study of Byzantine historical writing. All the papers in this volume focus on the new developments in the field, the recent discoveries and innovative methodological trends. The hope of the Organizing Committee is that the papers reflect the sum of our present capacity to face the challenge of the new approaches, whether they mainly submit traditional ideas to a searching re-examination or, alternatively, concentrate on the opening of new areas for research. The official motto of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Byzantium – a world of changes, acts as a sort of fil rouge to the present volume. By choosing the old dictum of Maximos Planoudes, we wanted to bring into focus both the ever changing nature of the scholarly inquiry into the Byzantine world and the inexhaustible interest of that world itself

History of Construction Cultures Volume 1

History of Construction Cultures Volume 1 contains papers presented at the 7ICCH – Seventh International Congress on Construction History, held at the Lisbon School of Architecture, Portugal, from 12 to 16 July, 2021. The conference has been organized by the Lisbon School of Architecture (FAUL), NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Portuguese Society for Construction History Studies and the University of the Azores. The contributions cover the wide interdisciplinary spectrum of Construction History and consist on the most recent advances in theory and practical case studies analysis, following themes such as: - epistemological issues; - building actors; - building materials; - building machines, tools and equipment; - construction processes; - building services and techniques ; -structural theory and analysis ; - political, social and economic aspects; - knowledge transfer and cultural translation of construction cultures. Furthermore, papers presented at thematic sessions aim at covering important problematics, historical periods and different regions of the globe, opening new directions for Construction History research. We are what we build and how we build; thus, the study of Construction History is now more than ever at the centre of current debates as to the shape of a sustainable future for humankind. Therefore, History of Construction Cultures is a critical and indispensable work to expand our understanding of the ways in which everyday building activities have been perceived and experienced in different cultures, from ancient times to our century and all over the world

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Leicester. Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin’s gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency