1,517 research outputs found
Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction
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 formsâroads, rails, pipes, and wiresâinfrastructure 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 âinfrastructurallyâ: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this projectâJames Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamidâtake 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
Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined
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
The Politics of Asceticism: An Analysis of the Political Spirituality of the Imperial Stoics
In recent decades a renewed focus on the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies has rehabilitated the practical aspect of ancient philosophy. This aspect of philosophy has continued to be part of the philosophical discipline but it has often been surpassed in importance and appreciation by philosophyâs theoretical discourse. With the increased focus on ancient philosophyâs practical outlook, an interesting question emerges: what does this practical outlook entail regarding how we interpret and analyse the political philosophy and political praxis of the ancient philosophers? In order to examine this question, this dissertation sheds light on Imperial Stoicism and examines this group of philosophersâ political philosophy in view of the concept of âpolitical spirituality.â The often-reiterated interpretation of Imperial Stoicism is that these philosophers were either entirely apolitical or that they, unlike their Hellenistic predecessors, were markedly conservative, reactionary, and generally supported the status quo of society despite an apparent subversive veneer. Both these interpretations are significantly questioned in this dissertation
Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity
Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century:
For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car,
from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad,
for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world?
How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations
in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication.
The authors and institutions come from all continents.
The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust!
The book is a continuation of the volume âCyber Ethics 4.0â published in 2018 by the same editors
New Cold War? A comparison of Russian and US foreign policy discourses in the time of deteriorating relations
This thesis examines the role that the Cold War discourse themes play in informing and structuring the American and Russian newspaper narratives in the time period of 2014-2017. It uncovers whether the portrayal of the contemporary relationship between Russia and the US in newspaper discourse can be traced back to the historical roots of Cold War struggles.
Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the thesis seeks to identify the contexts interwoven in newspaper narratives examined in this study, and how their interactions with themes of the Cold War discourse work to create meanings for these newspapersâ audiences. The study does a qualitative textual analysis of newspaper discourse within the frame of two case studies: the 2014 conflict in Ukraine and the 2016â2017-time frame that is associated with the U.S. presidential election pre-election period and the first year of Donald Trumpâs presidency.
This thesis fills a gap in the New Cold War discourse where no thematic comparative U.S.-Russia newspaper discourse study has been done thus far.
The findings indicate that particular elements of the Cold War discourse continue structuring the narratives that different Russian and American newspapers produce while reporting events occurring in the post-Cold War time, raising critical questions about the persistence of powerful historical discourses, and about the ability of media in Russia and in the US to rearticulate and regenerate discourses of global politics in the post-Cold War world
Articulating Tillichâs Spiritual presence
Articulating Tillichâs Spiritual Presence with Sartreâs Being and Nothingness and Rogersâ Person-Centered Therapy
Due to the formation of Paul Tillichâs symbolic claim of Spiritual Presence and universal essentialization, in Systematic Theology III, the genuineness of his claim was never examined. Because of this, the apex of his work, Spiritual Presence, remained speculative at best. It was unarticulated, underdeveloped, and gave no justification for why readers should give it weight. This thesis will argue the significance and validity of his work did not reach its full potential because of this.
While existentialism caused the development of Tillichâs theological claims, it is also a method able to test the speculations within it. While Tillich claimed universal Spiritual Presence was essentializing humanity through the structures of life, existentialism is used in this thesis to test that claim, through its observational analysis. This thesis seeks to take the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Carl Rogers to examine how Tillichâs Spiritual Presence might present itself in everyday life and then articulate those observations to contribute to a more developed understanding of Spiritual Presence.
This articulation of Spiritual Presence remedies Tillichâs claim from speculation to something justifiable, by Rogersâ clinical and Sartreâs analytical observation. The elements surrounding essentialization, like the idea of people having a true Essence, is also given definition, based upon existential observation.
Out of this existential articulation of Spiritual Presence, the idea of existential pneumatology is presented. The term existential pneumatology is a term that is original to myself, the author. An existential pneumatology represents my summarized findings of Tillichâs Spiritual Presence, existentially. Those findings are repackaged and re-described as the interplay of two concepts: (a)uthenticity and (A)uthenticity. They exhibit the results of the research on essentialization, within this thesis, in brevity
Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024
https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp
Named Entity Resolution in Personal Knowledge Graphs
Entity Resolution (ER) is the problem of determining when two entities refer
to the same underlying entity. The problem has been studied for over 50 years,
and most recently, has taken on new importance in an era of large,
heterogeneous 'knowledge graphs' published on the Web and used widely in
domains as wide ranging as social media, e-commerce and search. This chapter
will discuss the specific problem of named ER in the context of personal
knowledge graphs (PKGs). We begin with a formal definition of the problem, and
the components necessary for doing high-quality and efficient ER. We also
discuss some challenges that are expected to arise for Web-scale data. Next, we
provide a brief literature review, with a special focus on how existing
techniques can potentially apply to PKGs. We conclude the chapter by covering
some applications, as well as promising directions for future research.Comment: To appear as a book chapter by the same name in an upcoming (Oct.
2023) book `Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs): Methodology, tools and
applications' edited by Tiwari et a
Metaverse. Old urban issues in new virtual cities
Recent years have seen the arise of some early attempts to build virtual cities,
utopias or affective dystopias in an embodied Internet, which in some respects appear to
be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal city paradigma (even if virtual). Although
there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and
virtual or augmented reality linked mainly to the gaming industry, this often avoids design
and value issues. The observation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland,
Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - poses important questions and problems
that are gradually becoming inescapable for designers and urban planners, and allows
us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual
cities
The age of the bailout : contention, party-system collapse and reconstruction in Greece, 2009-2015
Defence date: 10 June 2019Examining Board:
Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute;
Prof. Elias Dinas, European University Institute;
Prof Maria Kousis, University of Crete;
Prof. Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton UniversityThe Greek epicenter of the Eurozone crisis was violently shaken by one of the deepest economic depressions of the past century. The call for financial assistance by the 2010 Greek government resulted in a series of bailouts whose conditionality and policy requirements deeply divided Greeks for the next eight years. This thesis deals with the dismantling of the Greek party-system during the Eurozone crisis, in conjunction with the volatile outburst of one of the proportionally largest protest campaigns in post-war Europe. The Greek case is interesting firstly due to its unique outlier status in multiple dimensions, like the depth of economic crisis, the unique mass scale of protest and party-system change. But beyond the case specifics, the thesis uses the Greek case as a unique contemporary vantage point to understand patterns of interaction between large-scale contentious and institutional politics and the mechanisms of abrupt party-system change. To study contentious institutional interactions, a novel framework is proposed, examining the Greek case through the detailed narration of four contentious episodes, streams of interactions among government, challengers and third parties around contested policy packages, the bailouts. This methodological novelty is complemented by a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the bailout-induced change in structures of policy-making and political competition, and thus the context within which the protest wave unfolded. The thesis follow the evolution of escalating protest and party-system unraveling through the succession of contentious episodes to detect the mechanisms through which they interact. I draws attention mainly to indirect mechanisms through which social movements influence party-system outcomes, namely elite breakdown and paralysis and the reconfiguration of dimensions of political conflict. Additionally, the dissertation delimits the effect of social movements mostly on those indirect effects. To complete the story of party-system punctuation, I expose critical elements of agency and structure unrelated to protest, such as the bailoutâs opportunity structure, shrewd party positioning and the revealing of the mental (mis)calculations of institutional protagonists, which are the other required elements to guide us through the process of Greek party-system implosion. The final chapters eventually expand on how this punctuation was overcome, this time by reference to the missing contentiousness and the ways Syriza used persuasion, its profile as a new party and its leaderâs popularity to avoid a repetition of the first cycle of contention, bringing the crisis full circle
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