2,326 research outputs found
The Council of Europe’s Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture: Hope for democracy or an allusive Utopia?
Democracies around the world are increasingly polarized along political and cultural lines. To address these challenges, in 2016, the Council of Europe (CoE) produced a model of twenty competences for democratic culture. In 2018, this same model became the basis of the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC). The RFCDC provides pedagogical instructions to help implement these competences. Together, I call this set of materials “the Framework”.
This thesis begins with the premise that utopia has long played an important role in the way power is maintained or resisted in democratic education. It questions the assumption that democratic culture can be cultivated instrumentally through policy- based competences without imposing power on subjects and views this assumption to be utopian. It thus excavates the potential utopian ideals at play in the Framework using ‘hidden utopias’ as a conceptual lens and method, which draws inspiration from the theories of Michèl Foucault, Ernst Bloch and Ruth Levitas.
It investigates how using ‘hidden utopias’ as a theoretical lens might facilitate a deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of the Framework, how implicit utopias might be at play, how this could be problematic and how these theories might shed light on the application of the Framework in pedagogical contexts. The contribution of this thesis is to make visible potential utopias at the heart of the Framework. It suggests that making implicit utopias visible in democratic education can help educators and learners engage with these discourses in critical and innovative ways and think beyond them
The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation
Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition.
In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authors’ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunker’s 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankine’s 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre
The C5ISR System Integrated with Unmanned Aircraft in the Large-Scale Combat Operations
The manner of conducting modern large-scale combat operations
(LSCOs) is characterized by the increasingly frequent and diverse use
of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrated into the Command,
Control, Computers, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance (C4IRS) system. These aircraft are one of the most
important types of weapons in modern LSCOs. Anyone that has the
technology can process the latest information from the field and safely
passes that information to the command center has a great advantage
and a chance to cause great damage to units whose goal is to prevent
further operational work. What is important is that UAVs must have some
degree of self-protection through site selection action to reconnaissance
and retreat routes. The paper presents the possibility of using UAVs for
various missions in LSCOs, as well as a case study of their use in previous
modern armed conflicts.
Command Center; C4IRS; Large-Scale Combat Operation; UAV; UCA
Gratitude in Healthcare an interdisciplinary inquiry
The expression and reception of gratitude is a significant dimension of interpersonal communication in care-giving relationships. Although there is a growing body of evidence that practising gratitude has health and wellbeing benefits for the giver and receiver, gratitude as a social emotion made in interaction has received comparatively little research attention. To address this gap, this thesis draws on a portfolio of qualitative methods to explore the ways in which gratitude is constituted in care provision in personal, professional, and public discourse. This research is informed by a discursive psychology approach in which gratitude is analysed, not as a morally virtuous character trait, but as a purposeful, performative social action that is mutually co-constructed in interaction.I investigate gratitude through studies that approach it on a meta, meso, macro, and micro level. Key intellectual traditions that underpin research literature on gratitude in healthcare are explored through a metanarrative review. Six underlying metanarratives were identified: social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; staff wellbeing; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. At the meso (institutional) level, a narrative analysis of an archive of letters between patients treated for tuberculosis and hospital almoners positions gratitude as participating in a Maussian gift-exchange ritual in which communal ties are created and consolidated.At the macro (societal) level, a discursive analysis of tweets of gratitude to the National Health Service at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that attitudes to gratitude were dynamic in response to events, with growing unease about deflecting attention from risk reduction for those working in the health and social care sectors. A follow-up analysis of the clap-for-carers movement implicates gratitude in embodied, symbolic, and imagined performances in debates about care justice. At the micro (interpersonal) level, an analysis of gratitude encounters broadcast in the BBC documentary series, Hospital, uses pragmatics and conversation analysis to argue that gratitude is an emotion made in talk, with the uptake of gratitude opportunities influencing the course of conversational sequencing. The findings challenge the oftenmade distinction between task-oriented and relational conversation in healthcare.Moral economics are paradigmatic in the philosophical conceptualisation of gratitude. My research shows that, although balance-sheet reciprocity characterised the institutional culture of the voluntary hospital, it is hardly ever a feature ofinterpersonal gratitude encounters. Instead, gratitude is accomplished as shared moments of humanity through negotiated encounters infused with affect. Gratitude should never be instrumentalised as compensating for unsafe, inadequatelyrenumerated work. Neither should its potential to enhance healthcare encounters be underestimated. Attention to gratitude can participate in culture change by affirming modes of acting, emoting, relating, expressing, and connecting that intersect with care justice.This thesis speaks to gratitude as a culturally salient indicator of what people express as worthy of appreciation. It calls for these expressions to be more closely attended to, not only as useful feedback that can inform change, but also because gratitude is a resource on which we can draw to enhance and enrich healthcare as a communal, collaborative, cooperative endeavour
IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -
Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ‘visual novel’, ‘dating simulator’ and ‘adult computer game’.
As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the game’s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ‘character intimacy games’, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the game’s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies.
The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases – The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyōron Kūkan – with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the game’s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics
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Alternative Power: The Politics of Denmark\u27s Renewable Energy Transition
Global climate change is one of the defining political challenges and opportunities of the current era. Experts widely agree that technical means already exist for making the necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; the obstacles to doing so are primarily political. Careful observers also recognize that this period of transition creates an opening for political innovation and development. How can the political will be generated to take action to prevent climate catastrophe? And what will the process of transitioning mean for the political systems that have been built on cheap and abundant oil? Political scientists have largely ignored technological development as a lever for political development, or feared that technology could only be a force of domination. Yet renewable energy enthusiasts have often seen democratizing potential in these technologies. What can be accomplished politically by building a wind turbine? As countries like Denmark accumulate decades of experience with renewable energy, it is becoming possible to give such questions close empirical consideration. Denmark generates more of its electricity from renewable sources, and has been doing so longer, than any other industrialized nation, making it a uniquely valuable case for studying an advanced renewable energy transition in progress. This dissertation draws on novel qualitative and quantitative data to present the first comprehensive history of Denmark’s energy transition from its roots in the 1970s until the present, aiming to explain how this tiny nation emerged as the world’s leading wind power producer, and assess whether this process has yielded any democratic dividends. The multi-method analysis sheds new light on internal dynamics of Denmark’s energy transition, and, more generally, on late-stage evolutionary processes in mature technological systems. Many studies have shown an interest in the Danish case, which is usually presented as a relatively unqualified success story, but few have provided the empirical resolution to identify these complicating factors. This dissertation employs an explanatory strategy adapted from the ecological sciences to construct a more holistic and integrative portrait, resulting in a more thorough and accurate account of how Denmark jumped out to such a significant lead in the energy transition, and why that momentum might be flagging today, with implications for other countries hoping to chart a path toward a sustainable future
Vagueness Markers in Italian
Moving from a broad socio-pragmatic perspective, this study analyses how speakers of different ages use a class of items and constructions that codify intentional vagueness in Italian.
Items as un po’ ‘a bit’, tipo ‘kind’, diciamo ‘let us say’, così ‘so’, e cose del genere ‘and things like that’, or cosa ‘thing’ constitute a class of linguistically heterogeneous means that often function in conversation as vagueness markers, i.e. elements by which speakers signal that their knowledge or communication are somehow only tentative, approximate and vague. Their use does not depend on language systemic factors, but is the result of a, more or less conscious, choice of speakers to enhance conversation for different reasons, which include facilitating the flow of conversation, signifying a vague categorization, and, eventually, being polite.
Operating at the pragmatic level, vagueness markers represent elements that are readily available to speakers’ choices and contribute to characterize individual and generational discourse styles. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins to a Milan radio station, this study investigates how vagueness markers are used by speakers of different ages in 1976 and in 2010, and how Italian discourse styles have evolved in the last forty years
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