1,111 research outputs found

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    Bridging Two Worlds

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    The rise of China and India could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will the foreign policies of China and India look like in the future? What should they look like? And what can each country learn from the other? Bridging Two Worlds gathers a coterie of experts in the field, analyzing profound political thinkers from these ancient regions whose theories of interstate relations set the terms for the debates today. This volume is the first work of its kind and is essential reading for anyone interested in the growth of China and India and what it means for the rest of the world. “This brilliant volume shines a light on the two great civilizations that will once again drive world history. No volume could be more timely, more relevant, and more needed than this one.” — KISHORE MAHBUBANI, Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute, NUS, and author of The Asian 21st Century “With the recently elevated economic and political power of China and the great potential of India in the twenty-first century, interdisciplinary dialogue and engagement such as is found in this book is necessary for contemporary debates in political theory and international relations.” — KUIYI SHEN, Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism, University of California, San Diego

    Investigating the non-work antecedents of workplace deviance

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    Deviance in the workplace, which has a huge destructive and harmful impact on the organization, is of key concern to academicians and practitioners. Existing literature focuses on the work-related antecedents of workplace deviance. However, the non-work-related antecedents have received little attention. Hence, the present research attempts to understand, the non-work antecedents that aggravate deviant behavior among employees at a workplace. The Gioia qualitative research approach was used to understand, examine, analyze, and interpret the views of respondents. A semi-structured interviewing technique was adopted. The respondents were encouraged to share their own experiences, thoughts, and understanding regarding the phenomenon. A sample of 25 experienced respondents from public and private organisations in Pakistan were interviewed. The results indicate that commuting factors (road hindrances, conflict behaviors, traffic discipline, and over-speeding), social factors (family-work conflict, and disturbed social relations), and an individual's lifestyle (attitude, physical inactivity, and sleep deprivation) are the contributing factors pertaining to the non-work antecedents of workplace deviance. The current study contributes to the literature by focusing on the non-work antecedents of workplace deviance

    Connected World:Insights from 100 academics on how to build better connections

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    Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe

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    Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe

    Epistemological Insecurity in the Anthropocene

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    This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer to as epistemological insecurity—a condition in which a subject’s growing awareness of systems degradation coincides with an onslaught of incomprehensibly vast, ever-expanding information about the system itself, rendering the individual subject incapable of making the kinds of risk assessments necessary to effectively navigate their environment. Over four chapters covering works of literature and television from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, including Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl, and several recent works of science fiction, I explore the ad hoc epistemic systems humans generate when entangled in material and informational ecosystems. My overarching argument is that as the formidability of unstable material environments becomes increasingly prevalent, it is necessary to consider how our stories, relationships, and the production of knowledge itself are transformed by the often incomprehensible nature of the sprawling social and ecological interconnections that structure our lives. Seeking models for such stories, relationships, and epistemic strategies, my dissertation casts a wide, interdisciplinary net that includes climate prognosticators, energy and information infrastructures, encyclopedias, cybernetics, geopolitics, geoengineering proposals, and conspiracy theories to engage with an array of diverse approaches to epistemological breakdown amidst destabilized environments

    The Self The Soul and The World: Affect Reason and Complexity

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    This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us

    Development and application of methodologies and infrastructures for cancer genome analysis within Personalized Medicine

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    [eng] Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized biomedical sciences, especially in the area of cancer. It has nourished genomic research with extensive collections of sequenced genomes that are investigated to untangle the molecular bases of disease, as well as to identify potential targets for the design of new treatments. To exploit all this information, several initiatives have emerged worldwide, among which the Pan-Cancer project of the ICGC (International Cancer Genome Consortium) stands out. This project has jointly analyzed thousands of tumor genomes of different cancer types in order to elucidate the molecular bases of the origin and progression of cancer. To accomplish this task, new emerging technologies, including virtualization systems such as virtual machines or software containers, were used and had to be adapted to various computing centers. The portability of this system to the supercomputing infrastructure of the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) has been carried out during the first phase of the thesis. In parallel, other projects promote the application of genomics discoveries into the clinics. This is the case of MedPerCan, a national initiative to design a pilot project for the implementation of personalized medicine in oncology in Catalonia. In this context, we have centered our efforts on the methodological side, focusing on the detection and characterization of somatic variants in tumors. This step is a challenging action, due to the heterogeneity of the different methods, and an essential part, as it lays at the basis of all downstream analyses. On top of the methodological section of the thesis, we got into the biological interpretation of the results to study the evolution of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in a close collaboration with the group of Dr. ElĂ­as Campo from the Hospital ClĂ­nic/IDIBAPS. In the first study, we have focused on the Richter transformation (RT), a transformation of CLL into a high-grade lymphoma that leads to a very poor prognosis and with unmet clinical needs. We found that RT has greater genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic complexity than CLL. Its genome may reflect the imprint of therapies that the patients received prior to RT, indicating the presence of cells exposed to these mutagenic treatments which later expand giving rise to the clinical manifestation of the disease. Multiple NGS- based techniques, including whole-genome sequencing and single-cell DNA and RNA sequencing, among others, confirmed the pre-existence of cells with the RT characteristics years before their manifestation, up to the time of CLL diagnosis. The transcriptomic profile of RT is remarkably different from that of CLL. Of particular importance is the overexpression of the OXPHOS pathway, which could be used as a therapeutic vulnerability. Finally, in a second study, the analysis of a case of CLL in a young adult, based on whole genome and single-cell sequencing at different times of the disease, revealed that the founder clone of CLL did not present any somatic driver mutations and was characterized by germline variants in ATM, suggesting its role in the origin of the disease, and highlighting the possible contribution of germline variants or other non-genetic mechanisms in the initiation of CLL
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