250 research outputs found

    Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

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    In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction

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    In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible

    Provincialising whiteness: Òyìnbó and the politics of race in Lagos, Nigeria

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    Much academic work on racialisation processes to date has focused on a geographically restricted range of racial regimes characterised by white supremacy. This study broadens the geographical scope of analyses by looking at race-making practices in Lagos, Nigeria. I explore the geographical specificity of race-making in Lagos through interrogation of the concept of òyìnbó – a Yorùbá word most often translated into English as ‘white person.’ By highlighting the particular meanings attached to òyìnbó, and the political work that racialisation does in this understudied context, I argue for the need to provincialise understandings of whiteness in studies of global race-making processes. The project is based upon eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork with Lagosians of different generations and social demographics at three different research sites: a senior secondary school, the University of Lagos, and at a church. My findings suggest that divergent meanings are attached to òyìnbós in these contexts, which do not universally celebrate whiteness. Rather, the practice of race-making in Lagos predominantly addresses local political concerns, and common attributes associated with òyìnbós are primarily evaluated according to local people’s own moral economy. This results in highly ambivalent attitudes to òyìnbós as individuals and to òyìnbó as trope. I suggest that these attitudes can best be explained by situating constructions of òyìnbós within their wider social context in Lagos. By centring local understandings in this way, I argue that the political practice of race-making in Lagos is not purely a reflection of a singular, global racial hierarchy, but a means of actively engaging with global and local power structures. I propose that seeking to understand the emic nature of divergent global race-making processes in this way has the potential to broaden academic understanding of these and related social phenomena

    REVERTING TO GREATNESS: WHITE -AMERICAN TRAUMA AND THE OCCLUSION OF MUSLIMS IN THE POST-9/11 ‘GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL’

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    Don DeLillo, in his December 2001 Harper’s article, “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” urged fellow American writers to create “the counternarrative” that would take back control of culture from terrorists who threatened it. DeLillo’s call for nation-rebuilding cultural production hearkens back to John William de Forest’s original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the “Great American Novel”. Examining four seminal post-9/11 novels through the conceptual framework of a “new” Great American Novel oeuvre, I demonstrate a concerted effort by the authors to address what I have termed the “Muslim Question”. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), DeLillo’s own Falling Man (2007), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) all feature traumatized white Americans creating a variety of mechanisms with which to mitigate the trauma of 9/11 as it resurges at even the thought of Muslims existing in America after 9/11. By examining the mechanisms of repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization, I critically analyze the iterations of “solutions” while also demonstrating the abandonment of American ideals by the traumatized white Americans. The spectral, fluid, and slippery notion of the so-called Great American Novel looms in the background as a tradition within which each of these novels operates; and it provides the lens necessary to see literary concerns and depictions shifting in America after the terrorist attack. While the original concept of the Great American Novel featured novels with multifaceted explorations of the American Dream, the renewed interest in creating nation-rebuilding texts is threatening to stagnate and congeal particularly around examining the relative success of the mechanisms of occluding Muslims and Islam within and from the United States

    Constitutions of Value

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    Gathering an interdisciplinary range of cutting-edge scholars, this book addresses legal constitutions of value. Global value production and transnational value practices that rely on exploitation and extraction have left us with toxic commons and a damaged planet. Against this situation, the book examines law’s fundamental role in institutions of value production and valuation. Utilising pathbreaking theoretical approaches, it problematizes mainstream efforts to redeem institutions of value production by recoupling them with progressive values. Aiming beyond radical critique, the book opens up the possibility of imagining and enacting new and different value practices. This wide-ranging and accessible book will appeal to international lawyers, socio-legal scholars, those working at the intersections of law and economy and others, in politics, economics, environmental studies and elsewhere, who are concerned with rethinking our current ideas of what has value, what does not, and whether and how value may be revalued

    Intégration des méthodes formelles dans le développement des RCSFs

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    In this thesis, we have relied on formal techniques in order to first evaluate WSN protocols and then to propose solutions that meet the requirements of these networks. The thesis contributes to the modelling, analysis, design and evaluation of WSN protocols. In this context, the thesis begins with a survey on WSN and formal verification techniques. Focusing on the MAC layer, the thesis reviews proposed MAC protocols for WSN as well as their design challenges. The dissertation then proceeds to outline the contributions of this work. As a first proposal, we develop a stochastic generic model of the 802.11 MAC protocol for an arbitrary network topology and then perform probabilistic evaluation of the protocol using statistical model checking. Considering an alternative power source to operate WSN, energy harvesting, we move to the second proposal where a protocol designed for EH-WSN is modelled and various performance parameters are evaluated. Finally, the thesis explores mobility in WSN and proposes a new MAC protocol, named "Mobility and Energy Harvesting aware Medium Access Control (MEH-MAC)" protocol for dynamic sensor networks powered by ambient energy. The protocol is modelled and verified under several features

    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

    Applications

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    Volume 3 describes how resource-aware machine learning methods and techniques are used to successfully solve real-world problems. The book provides numerous specific application examples: in health and medicine for risk modelling, diagnosis, and treatment selection for diseases in electronics, steel production and milling for quality control during manufacturing processes in traffic, logistics for smart cities and for mobile communications

    Advances in Artificial Intelligence: Models, Optimization, and Machine Learning

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    The present book contains all the articles accepted and published in the Special Issue “Advances in Artificial Intelligence: Models, Optimization, and Machine Learning” of the MDPI Mathematics journal, which covers a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of artificial intelligence and its subfields. These topics include, among others, deep learning and classic machine learning algorithms, neural modelling, architectures and learning algorithms, biologically inspired optimization algorithms, algorithms for autonomous driving, probabilistic models and Bayesian reasoning, intelligent agents and multiagent systems. We hope that the scientific results presented in this book will serve as valuable sources of documentation and inspiration for anyone willing to pursue research in artificial intelligence, machine learning and their widespread applications
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