"Daleki svijet muzikom dokuěen"("A distant world touched by music"): a contextual and critical study of Yugoslavian music as exemplified in the life and music of Josip Stolcer Slavenski (1896-1955)

The core of this study is a contextual, critical and analytical study of the life and work of Josip Stolcer Slavenski (1886-1955). It consists of a brief outline of nineteenth-century socio-political, cultural and musical trends in the former Yugoslavia which serves as a broader context for the period of Moderna (avant-garde). This movement, which attempted to embrace new ideas and developments of mainstream western Europe, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and played a major role in Slavenski's musical development. Parucular reference to Slavenski's circumstances are examined in the biographical chapter and his periods of study in Budapest, Prague and Paris are discussed, as is the important recognition of his music at the Donaueschingen Festival in the 1920s, and how the changing political climate of Yugoslavia, from monarchy to republic, influenced Slavenski's political and national affiliations. With this contextual backdrop, which includes reference to a number of Slavenski's contemporaries - namely Kodaly, Bartok, Suk, Novak, Hindemith, composers of the Second Viennese School, and his own Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian compatriots, the dissertation focusses on particular aspects of Slavenski's work with special emphasis on his use of Balkan folk music, his autodidactic theories of 'Astroacoustics', the expressionist fabric of his music, and the socialist realism of his later works during the 1940s and 1950s.In attempting to illuminate the nature of the 'Slavenski phenomena', this work also offers certain suggestions as to what might have been the reasons for the neglect and creative aridity of his later years. Furthermore, it is hoped that the conclusions of this study may in themselves provide an impetus for further research into Slavenski's work which has received little attention in English-speaking musicology

Women's stories of the Yugoslav breakup: Wartime experiences of deviance

This project investigates how women construct accounts of the Yugoslav breakup as gendered performances, contributing to Balkan criminology and narrative criminology. Their accounts relate to the wartime illicit settings of the black market and smuggling. Based upon fieldwork in Cyprus and Serbia, during which two narrative interviews were conducted, this study explores how women narrate their stories of illegality with the benefit of distance, particularly how they discursively employ gender as situated subjects in and producers of their discourses. The project elevates the time and context-specific nature of the narratives to see how women narrate their stories as women war survivors; actors in illicit settings and in their accounts. It is stated that a narrative approach reveals women’s complexity of their storied experience and their choices - taken within gendered restrictions, but discursively crafted. The project shows the ways women’s stories diversify and externalise discourses of the Yugoslav breakup into broader criminological inquiries relating to women’s criminality; their relation to crime, multiplicity of experience, and broader understandings of criminality. It concludes that women construct their accounts in ways that inform and ‘genderise’ existing discourses, elevating agency in discourses of disadvantage and vulnerability, drawing on women’s conventionality and wartime normative criminality, and re-negotiating situated positions in wartime and post-war discourses. And as such, their accounts become a great source of enriching existing stories, including women’s agency in stories of considerably limited agency within discourses of the Yugoslav conflicts. They constitute part of a broader criminological inquiry relating to incorporating women’s stories to further our understandings of deviance

Bearing witness: an analysis of the reporting and the reception of news about distant suffering in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s work on witness

In this thesis I analyse the reporting and the reception of news about distant suffering in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s work on witness. Studies of news reporting about foreign wars, genocide and disasters commonly conclude that the practice of bearing witness to distant suffering contributes to a context where both journalists and spectators appear to have limited moral agency. I argue that the practice of bearing witness has ethical significance for those actively engaged in bearing witnessing. In his work on Christian witness, Yoder demonstrates how witness can be understood as a method for moral reasoning. I assert that Yoder‘s argument presents a fruitful approach for interdisciplinary consideration of the ethical significance found in the practice of bearing witness to distant human suffering. In chapter one, I lay the foundation of my investigation into the ethical agency involved in bearing witness. John Howard Yoder‘s theological approach to social ethics provides that foundation. Central to Yoder‘s claim that witness is a form of ethics, is the premise that presence testifies. Yoder calls this the 'phenomenology of social witness‘. Yoder‘s work opens new ways in which to ask questions about the practice of bearing witness as a form of social ethics. It is from this foundation that I begin to ask questions about the news media practice of bearing witness to distant suffering, the subject of chapter two. Media practices are social practices that involve a dense interaction of many layers of society. In the media practice of witnessing distant suffering, governments, charities, news media organisations, and audiences are all involved in what I call the social formation of the Global Samaritan. The foundational work on Yoder in chapter one allows me to ask the question: How is the Global Samaritan a presence, and to what does this presence testify? In chapters three and four, I focus on two of the prominent groups which contribute to the formation of the Global Samaritan: audiences and foreign correspondents. News audiences as moral agents already seem a problem for Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies. Do audiences who bear witness to distant suffering have moral agency? How can the amorphous and fleeting presence of television, internet, or twitter audiences testify? In the chapter on audiences, the initial claim regarding presence makes for an important investigation into how audiences can potentially move beyond mere spectatorship and towards participation in care for the suffering. Foreign correspondents bearing witness to distant suffering do not face the same obstacles to testifying as audiences do. After all, foreign correspondents are often live, on-the-scene of extraordinary circumstances of suffering. The danger and risks foreign correspondents face in order to report live from scenes of devastation and disaster testify to the fact that the situation is indeed dangerous and causing suffering. Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies is a claim strongly paralleled within the tradition of investigative journalism. In chapter four, I investigate the ethical function of foreign correspondent presence. I consider the foreign correspondent‘s dual role as the proxy 'eyes and ears‘ of the public and the proxy voice for those without a voice. Through these two roles, I explore major concepts involved in the practice of investigative journalism. One prominent issue I explore is the tension between the principles of a liberal democratic press and the practice of frontline reporters live, on-the-scene of extraordinary and extreme situations. In the final chapter, chapter five, I focus on the experience of three frontline reporters bearing witness to human suffering. BBC [British Broadcasting Company] reporter John Simpson‘s reflections on his coverage of the beginning of the Iraq War illustrate the importance of bearing witness as involving real presence on location. Norwegian freelance reporter Ǻsne Seierstad‘s reflections on covering the Iraq War from Baghdad further contributes to the concept of 'being there‘ as central to bearing witness. Focus on Seierstad also furthers discussion on women reporters bearing witness to war. The third reporter I highlight is BBC reporter Fergal Keane. I focus on his reflections covering the Rwandan genocide to illustrate how the claim to bearing witness involves more than spectatorship, but often involves participation. I conclude with an analysis of the media practice of bearing witness, involving the range of reporter presence to the quasi-presence of the audience, in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s claim that bearing witness is a form of social ethics

Essays On The Economics Of Corruption, Institutions, And Management Practices

My thesis focuses on the economics of corruption, institutions, and management practices. The impact of corruption on economic performance is a key issue in development economics, central to the evaluation and design of public policies. Chapter one introduces the theoretical framework of this thesis. It highlights the embeddedness of corruption at every institutional level and its interdependence with other institutions. The framework identifies petty and grand corruption and corruption at different levels, at the industry, region and country level, to examine the interrelation between corruption, other institutions, and management decisions on the resource allocation of firms, and the impact of public sector reforms in reducing corruption. Chapter two and three examine the two channels through which corruption affects private sector development, the external environment under which firms operate, and their internal environment. Chapter two analyses the relationship between corruption measured at different levels and firm performance. I find that at the individual firm level, corruption could be, in some cases, profit-maximizing. However, at the regional and country level, I find that the aggregate costs of corruption remain negative and significant for all firms. Chapter three examines the impact of corruption on the firm’s management practices. I investigate the impact of regional corruption on the management quality of firms within the manufacturing sector in Central and Eastern Europe. I find that firms in more contract-dependent industries located in more corrupt regions tend to have lower management quality. Chapter four by contrast looks at factors that help eliminate corruption at the macro-level, and specifically e-government. I find that the development of online services by the state tends to decrease corruption, and that progress in e-government can facilitate several business processes. Chapter five, concludes. I review the main contributions of the thesis and discuss future research

Гласник Етнографског института САНУ 65 (1) / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 65 (1)

Тема броја – Антропологија државе (ур. Марина Симић и МилошНичић) / Topic of the Issue – Anthropology of the State (eds. Marina Simić and Miloš Ničić

Trustworthy AI Alone Is Not Enough

The aim of this book is to make accessible to both a general audience and policymakers the intricacies involved in the concept of trustworthy AI. In this book, we address the issue from philosophical, technical, social, and practical points of view. To do so, we start with a summary definition of Trustworthy AI and its components, according to the HLEG for AI report. From there, we focus in detail on trustworthy AI in large language models, anthropomorphic robots (such as sex robots), and in the use of autonomous drones in warfare, which all pose specific challenges because of their close interaction with humans. To tie these ideas together, we include a brief presentation of the ethical validation scheme for proposals submitted under the Horizon Europe programme as a possible way to address the operationalisation of ethical regulation beyond rigid rules and partial ethical analyses. We conclude our work by advocating for the virtue ethics approach to AI, which we view as a humane and comprehensive approach to trustworthy AI that can accommodate the pace of technological change

“Russians are very sweet and nice”:a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of the representation of people in online travel reviews about Moscow

The paper explores how guests and hosts are represented in online travel reviews about Moscow. Tourism provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the sociocultural background of other nations and potentially to improve international relations. Moscow, the capital of Russia, is sometimes viewed as an unfriendly or unsafe destination and the Russian Government aims to increase the popularity of the city. However, there are concerns that modern tourism discourse contributes to the maintenance of asymmetrical guest-host power relations. Guests are often accused of consumerism while hosts are frequently backgrounded or represented as servants or cultural markers. Such representation can lead to client-servant attitude and even cause discrimination against hosts. While online travel reviews are considered an important genre of tourism discourse, most studies analyse the representation of people in promotional or media discourse. Considering that multimodality is an integral feature of tourism discourse and that the analysis of discourse patterns allows exploring the meanings widely shared by the society, the study utilizes a corpus-assisted multimodal approach by analysing the representation of people in headlines, texts, images and image captions of a corpus of online travel reviews. The analysis corroborates previous conclusions that guests tend to be represented as consumers enjoying themselves while hosts are perceived as friendly servants. However, the study provides evidence that tourists can background not only hosts but also themselves or other tourists. Moreover, the results reveal that in contrast to promotional and media discourse, guests can also portray themselves as active, solving problems while sometimes representing guests as rude or unwelcoming. The results also show that the representation of people can vary across the modes of the same document. The study concludes that user-generated tourism discourse reveals a complex picture and can express resistance to the dominant institutional imagery

Successful Demand Forecasting Modeling Strategies for Increasing Small Retail Medical Supply Profitability

The lack of effective demand forecasting strategies can result in imprecise inventory replenishment, inventory overstock, and unused inventory. The purpose of this single case study was to explore successful demand forecasting strategies that leaders of a small, retail, medical supply business used to increase profitability. The conceptual framework for this study was Winters\u27s forecasting demand approach. Data were collected from semistructured, face-to-face interviews with 8 business leaders of a private, small, retail, medical supply business in the southeastern United States and the review of company artifacts. Yin\u27s 5-step qualitative data analysis process of compiling, disassembling, reassembling, interpreting, and concluding was applied. Key themes that emerged from data analysis included understanding sales trends, inventory management with pricing, and seasonality. The findings of this study might contribute to positive social change by encouraging leaders of medical supply businesses to apply demand forecasting strategies that may lead to benefits for medically underserved citizens in need of accessible and abundant medical supplies