985 research outputs found

    Considering Black male consciousness within the context of genre : a framework for engaging and analyzing bodies of literature that center Black male bodies and their racialized experiences

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    Considering Black Male Consciousness within the Context of Genre: A Framework for Engaging and Analyzing Bodies of Literature that Center Black Male Bodies and their Racialized Experiences represents primarily the union of genre studies and Tommy J. Curry’s (2017) Man-Not—a theory that accounts for the historical/societal gendering of Black males, a practice that does not account for the various masculinities, or genres represented by Black manhood. The coupling of these concepts ultimately leads to the culmination of Black Male Consciousness (BMC) as genre and a related set of signposts for analysis to be used in the secondary English classroom. The historical underpinnings of Curry’s (2017) work with genre in relation to Black men and boys along with the conceptual frameworks presented by genre systems are rarely, if ever, met with a level of pedagogical nuance necessary for disrupting deficit models of being that are continuously used to construct and perpetuate caricatures associated with Black male bodies in both literature and in life. As such, the Black Male Consciousness (BMC) as genre framework aims to help readers (both teachers and students) make meaning from Black males’ lived experiences—as presented by Black males—while creating a space in which readers are urged to interrogate social constructs and internalized beliefs around Black manhood

    Tracing the Critical Reception of Walter Scott in Italy: 1945-2020

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    In The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (2007), a cura di Murray Pittock, è subito evidente che quando si parla della ricezione europea di Walter Scott, non c’è un capitolo dedicato alla sua influenza in Italia. Sebbene la questione italiana sia brevemente trattata in varie sezioni del volume, lo stesso curatore afferma nell’introduzione che ‘si è rivelato impossibile ottenere una copertura soddisfacente del Portogallo o dell'Italia’. Sebbene esistano studi dedicati alla ricezione italiana di Scott, i quali si concentrano maggiormente sulla sua accoglienza in Italia nell'Ottocento, non esisteva ancora un’analisi completa della sua influenza e risposta in Italia in tempi più recenti. Infatti, il periodo che va dalla seconda metà del Novecento ad oggi non era ancora stato investigato. Lo scopo principale di questa ricerca è stato quindi quello di ripercorrere la storia letteraria e critica di Walter Scott in Italia dal dopoguerra ai giorni nostri, cercando di comprendere i motivi per cui nel corso del 1900 la sua popolarità sperimentò un evidente declino. Il punto di partenza è stata la rassegna e l’analisi degli studi critici dedicati a Scott nel corso del Novecento fino ai giorni nostri. La ricerca ha esplorato poi l’influenza di alcuni dei più importanti intellettuali italiani (e stranieri) sull’accoglienza di Scott in Italia. Tutto il discorso è stato contestualizzato secondo le principali teorie critiche che hanno segnato ogni fase del Novecento e dell’inizio del nuovo millennio per costruire un’analisi complessiva della ricezione italiana di Scott. È stato anche scopo di questa ricerca raccogliere in una lista gli studi critici, le nuove traduzioni, le edizioni e le riedizioni per costruire una cronologia della ricezione italiana di Scott. L’obiettivo finale è stato quindi il tracciare la presenza dell’autore nel Paese e comprendere le fluttuazioni che hanno caratterizzato la sua fama nel corso di settantacinque anni.In The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (2007), edited by Murray Pittock, it emerges that when speaking about the European reception of Walter Scott, there is not a dedicated chapter to his reception in Italy. Although the Italian situation is briefly treated in various sections of the volume, the editor himself states in the introduction that ‘it proved impossible to get satisfactory coverage of Portugal or Italy’. Although there are studies devoted to Scott’s Italian reception, which specifically focus on his early reception in the nineteenth century, there was not yet a comprehensive analysis of his most recent influence and response in Italy. The entire period from the second half of the twentieth century until today was still uncovered. The main purpose of this research was therefore to retrace the literary and critical history of Walter Scott in Italy, trying to understand the reasons why during 1900 he experienced an evident decline in popularity. The starting point was the review of the critical studies dedicated to Scott during the course of the twentieth century up to the present day. The research then explored the influence of some of the most important Italian (and foreign) intellectuals on Scott’s reception in Italy. The whole discourse was contextualised according to the main critical theories that marked each phase of the twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries to build a comprehensive analysis of Scott’s Italian reception. It was also the aim of this research to collect the critical studies, new translations, editions, and re-editions to build a timeline of Scott’s Italian reception. The final goal was to trace the author’s presence in the country and understand the fluctuations that characterised his fame over the course of seventy-five years

    Blackness as a question of freedom: racial blackness in South African emancipatory thought

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    This dissertation, using the theoretical framework of Afropessimism, discusses how Blackness is an ethico-political structure, in which the slave's natal alienation and social death establishes the resilient forms of Black (non)being. This project centrally argues against locating a theory of the production of Blackness in the socio-political relations of colonial subjugation, and instead proposes that Blackness is a structure, an ‘abstract code', that must be understood as deriving from racial slavery. This thought enterprise is explored in relation to South African histories of slavery to re-claim the concept of “social death” as inaugurating the structure of Blackness in Southern Africa. By suggesting how it is the absolute negation of the Black slave that creates the conditions for the possibility of the political, ethical, and civil subject – indeed, the very possibility of the Human, this study presents a discussion on how Black studies requires both a temporal and geographical reconstruction in understanding – firstly by extending much further ‘back' than the moment of South African colonialism, and secondly, by expanding the geographies of Blackness beyond European colonial rule. Furthermore, this study explores and exposes the limits of several major South African forms of political and philosophical thought and campaigns for Black emancipation: feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and Black Consciousness. An exploration which serves to highlight how the existing historiography of South Africa has disarticulated the conceptual significance of racial slavery to the making of Blackness in a way that locates it specifically in social death, with all its implications for Black (non)being. While recognizing that the political structure of Blackness precedes or cannot be located in the mechanics of South African colonial settlements, this dissertation exposes the limits and failures of a civil politics of Blackness in both national liberation and ‘progressive' struggles

    Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

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    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

    Toxic Timescapes: Examining Toxicity across Time and Space

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    An interdisciplinary environmental humanities volume that explores human-environment relationships on our permanently polluted planet. While toxicity and pollution are ever present in modern daily life, politicians, juridical systems, media outlets, scholars, and the public alike show great difficulty in detecting, defining, monitoring, or generally coming to terms with them. This volume’s contributors argue that the source of this difficulty lies in the struggle to make sense of the intersecting temporal and spatial scales working on the human and more-than-human body, while continuing to acknowledge race, class, and gender in terms of global environmental justice and social inequality. The term toxic timescapes refers to this intricate intersectionality of time, space, and bodies in relation to toxic exposure. As a tool of analysis, it unpacks linear understandings of time and explores how harmful substances permeate temporal and physical space as both event and process. It equips scholars with new ways of creating data and conceptualizing the past, present, and future presence and possible effects of harmful substances and provides a theoretical framework for new environmental narratives. To think in terms of toxic timescapes is to radically shift our understanding of toxicants in the complex web of life. Toxicity, pollution, and modes of exposure are never static; therefore, dose, timing, velocity, mixture, frequency, and chronology matter as much as the geographic location and societal position of those exposed. Together, these factors create a specific toxic timescape that lies at the heart of each contributor’s narrative. Contributors from the disciplines of history, human geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and political ecology come together to demonstrate the complex reality of a toxic existence. Their case studies span the globe as they observe the intersection of multiple times and spaces at such diverse locations as former battlefields in Vietnam, aging nuclear-weapon storage facilities in Greenland, waste deposits in southern Italy, chemical facilities along the Gulf of Mexico, and coral-breeding laboratories across the world.https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/1014/thumbnail.jp

    Rural Schooling and Good Life in Late Socialist Laos: Articulations, sketches and moments of good time

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    Drawing on ethnographic research in northern Laos, this chapter analyses articulations of a good life in primary school textbook imagery and how this resonates with everyday life in rural upland communities. This is contrasted with children’s sketches of a good life found in the classrooms and ethnographic accounts of moments of ‘good time’ in the context of rural schooling. It is argued that these latter moments constitute brief instances of a good life in the present. Given the hierarchical power relations in which rural education is embedded, not all of these good times stay good for very long. This is reflective of the condition of late socialism in rural Laos

    Meta-ontology fault detection

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    Ontology engineering is the field, within knowledge representation, concerned with using logic-based formalisms to represent knowledge, typically moderately sized knowledge bases called ontologies. How to best develop, use and maintain these ontologies has produced relatively large bodies of both formal, theoretical and methodological research. One subfield of ontology engineering is ontology debugging, and is concerned with preventing, detecting and repairing errors (or more generally pitfalls, bad practices or faults) in ontologies. Due to the logical nature of ontologies and, in particular, entailment, these faults are often both hard to prevent and detect and have far reaching consequences. This makes ontology debugging one of the principal challenges to more widespread adoption of ontologies in applications. Moreover, another important subfield in ontology engineering is that of ontology alignment: combining multiple ontologies to produce more powerful results than the simple sum of the parts. Ontology alignment further increases the issues, difficulties and challenges of ontology debugging by introducing, propagating and exacerbating faults in ontologies. A relevant aspect of the field of ontology debugging is that, due to the challenges and difficulties, research within it is usually notably constrained in its scope, focusing on particular aspects of the problem or on the application to only certain subdomains or under specific methodologies. Similarly, the approaches are often ad hoc and only related to other approaches at a conceptual level. There are no well established and widely used formalisms, definitions or benchmarks that form a foundation of the field of ontology debugging. In this thesis, I tackle the problem of ontology debugging from a more abstract than usual point of view, looking at existing literature in the field and attempting to extract common ideas and specially focussing on formulating them in a common language and under a common approach. Meta-ontology fault detection is a framework for detecting faults in ontologies that utilizes semantic fault patterns to express schematic entailments that typically indicate faults in a systematic way. The formalism that I developed to represent these patterns is called existential second-order query logic (abbreviated as ESQ logic). I further reformulated a large proportion of the ideas present in some of the existing research pieces into this framework and as patterns in ESQ logic, providing a pattern catalogue. Most of the work during my PhD has been spent in designing and implementing an algorithm to effectively automatically detect arbitrary ESQ patterns in arbitrary ontologies. The result is what we call minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic, an extension of first-order resolution, drawing on important ideas from higher-order unification and implementing a novel approach to unification problems using dependency graphs. I have proven important theoretical properties about this algorithm such as its soundness, its termination (in a certain sense and under certain conditions) and its fairness or completeness in the enumeration of infinite spaces of solutions. Moreover, I have produced an implementation of minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic in Haskell that has passed all unit tests and produces non-trivial results on small examples. However, attempts to apply this algorithm to examples of a more realistic size have proven unsuccessful, with computation times that exceed our tolerance levels. In this thesis, I have provided both details of the challenges faced in this regard, as well as other successful forms of qualitative evaluation of the meta-ontology fault detection approach, and discussions about both what I believe are the main causes of the computational feasibility problems, ideas on how to overcome them, and also ideas on other directions of future work that could use the results in the thesis to contribute to the production of foundational formalisms, ideas and approaches to ontology debugging that can properly combine existing constrained research. It is unclear to me whether minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic can, in its current shape, be implemented efficiently or not, but I believe that, at the very least, the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that I have presented in this thesis will be useful to produce more foundational results in the field

    LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volum
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