Changing Time - Shaping World: Changemakers in Arts & Education

A World of Changemakers - how can a hybrid arts lecture series concept in e-learning create attitudes and shape skills as a playful and critical thinking navigator in an uncertain world? To re-create meaning is an interdisciplinary cross-sectional task of our zeitgeist in a civil society. The international contributors represent key roles in relevant philosophical, technical or economic debates, non-university community art & design projects or companies

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo

The novel at work: Reflections on art and politics in selected counter-totalitarian novels, 1920-70

The novel’s ability to portray and protest the political is generally well recognized. More controversial is how, and with what effects, the assertive nature of political critique combines with the open-ended qualities of artistic expression. Such is the problem confronting this thesis. My inquiry is based on a selection of early to mid-twentieth century counter-totalitarian novels, drawn from across Western Europe and Russia, and representing a variety of different literary styles and political commitments. In the case of Western Europe, my selected authors are Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell; for Russia, they are Yevgeny Zamyatin, Andrei Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. How we ‘read’ the artistic/political relationship is important as it influences how we approach texts, the kinds of questions we ask, and the nature of the conclusions we reach. These issues find a theoretical home in the debate on politically committed art, where theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière oppose the overt commitments of authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht. My contention is that the abstractions of this debate obscure the density of the relationship, both as it is experienced by authors and as it may strike us as readers. Hence I argue for a grounded approach to the issue: that is, one that is attentive to the detail of texts situated in all the specificity of their political, historical circumstances. For my guide to the literary practices of the novel, I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin, focusing on the dialogic and polyphonic, the parodic and subversive, and the time/space settings of chronotope. These elements show how the political can be expressed in an evocative and/or subversive way. At the same time, Bakhtin’s binary distinctions—the monological and dialogical; the centripetal and centrifugal qualities of language; and the notions of finalizability and unfinalizability—invite further reflection, for they promote an oppositional reading of the artistic/political relationship, and thus form part of the problem with which I am critically engaged. In concluding, I expand on the intricate intersections between finalizability and unfinalizability; the carrying power of the texts’ imaginative calls; and the force of their emotional narratives. The inquiry is broad-ranging and interdisciplinary, drawing variously on the insights of literary theory, philosophy and political analysis. It aims to be of interest to all those broadly concerned with fiction’s powers to speak to the political in its distinctive and controversial fashion

SEE

"Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world. This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

Nordic Homicide in Deep Time

Nordic Homicide in Deep Time draws a unique and detailed picture of developments in human interpersonal violence and presents new findings on rates, patterns, and long-term changes in lethal violence in the Nordics. Conducted by an interdisciplinary team of criminologists and historians, the book analyses homicide and lethal violence in northern Europe in two eras – the 17th century and early 21st century. Similar and continuous societal structures, cultural patterns, and legal cultures allow for long-term and comparative homicide research in the Nordic context. Reflecting human universals and stable motives, such as revenge, jealousy, honour, and material conflicts, homicide as a form of human behaviour enables long-duration comparison. By describing the rates and patterns of homicide during these two eras, the authors unveil continuity and change in human violence. Where and when did homicide typically take place? Who were the victims and the offenders, what where the circumstances of their conflicts? Was intimate partner homicide more prevalent in the early modern period than in present times? How long a time elapsed from violence to death? Were homicides often committed in the context of other crime? The book offers answers to these questions among others, comparing regions and eras. We gain a unique and empirically grounded view on how state consolidation and changing routines of everyday life transformed the patterns of criminal homicide in Nordic society. The path to pacification was anything but easy, punctuated by shorter crises of social turmoil, and high violence. The book is also a methodological experiment that seeks to assess the feasibility of long-duration standardized homicide analysis and to better understand the logic of homicide variation across space and over time. In developing a new approach for extending homicide research into the deep past, the authors have created the Historical Homicide Monitor. The new instrument combines wide explanatory scope, measurement standardization, and articulated theory expression. By retroactively expanding research data to the pre-statistical era, the method enables long-duration comparison of different periods and areas. Based on in-depth source critique, the approach captures patterns of criminal behaviour, beyond the control activity of the courts. The authors foresee the application of their approach in even remoter periods. Nordic Homicide in Deep Time helps the reader to understand modern homicide by revealing the historical continuities and changes in lethal violence. The book is written for professionals, university students and anyone interested in the history of human behaviour