LDE HERITAGE CONFERENCE on Heritage and the Sustainable Development Goals:

Heritage—natural and cultural, material and immaterial—plays a key role in the development of sustainable cities and communities. Goal 11, target 4, of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasizes the relation between heritage and sustainability. The International LDE Heritage conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development Goals, which took place from 26 to 28 November 2019 at TU Delft in the Netherlands, examined the theories, methodologies, and practices of heritage and SDGs. It asked: How is heritage produced and defined? By whom and in what contexts? What are the conceptions of sustainability, and in what ways are these situational and contextual? How can theoretical findings on heritage and SDGs engage with heritage practice? The conference built on the multidisciplinary expertise of academics in the humanities, social, and spatial sciences, notably the interdisciplinary crossover research program, Design & History, the new theme of Heritage Futures at TU Delft, on active collaboration within the LDE Center for Global Heritage and Development (CGHD), and on heritage-related research conducted by the three partner universities Leiden, Delft and Erasmus in Rotterdam by further associated partners in the consortium and internationally. At TU Delft the research programs bring together different departments and disciplines: architecture, urbanism, history, landscape architecture, real estate and management, and engineering. They aim to further an interdisciplinary understanding of the transformation of the built environment and, through the consistent use of the past, to enable buildings, cities, and landscapes to become more sustainable, resource-efficient, resilient, safe, and inclusive. Researchers from Leiden University approach heritage from a broad variety of disciplinary perspectives, such as archaeology, museum studies, cultural anthropology, and area studies. Heritage research at Leiden University explores processes of heritage creation, and the appreciation and evaluation of material and immaterial heritage, to gain new insights into the cultural constitution of societies. Creating, acknowledging, and contesting heritage tends to be politically sensitive as it involves assertions and redefinitions of memory and identity. History and social studies scholars from Erasmus University in Rotterdam add further insights into heritage practice. This conference created a setting where academics and heritage practitioners could explore these questions from specific perspectives. It brought together 120 academics and practitioners keen to develop their understanding of and their input into heritage conservation, and to increase their contributions towards the development of sustainable cities and communities. The three-day conference combined a variety of formats. Participants engaged in nine academic sessions with peer-reviewed papers, eight roundtables on strategic goals, and six workshops spent applying specific methods and tools

E-Learning Technologies and Its Application in Higher Education:A Descriptive Comparison of Germany,United Kingdom and United States.

There is a general agreement that we have entered the information economy, that higher education is a critical element in this knowledge society. This has placed a new demand on its teaching and research functions, with growing emphasis on lifelong learning and more flexible forms of higher education delivery. Notwithstanding, there is also a widespread scepticism as to whether educational systems will be able to overcome their traditional inertia and respond to the challenge of the knowledge-based revolution. Currently the prominence of ICT and other external influencing factors; economic, social, cultural and the changing role of governmental policy are driving the inner life of the higher education sector. In that respect many higher educational institutions are turning to e-learning technologies for improving the quality of learning by means of access to resources, services, long distance collaborations and exchanges. However this transition has been characterized by a mixed sense of optimism, skeptism and a lack of “adequate benchmarks”. It is within this background that this explorative study sought to carry out a descriptive comparison between Germany, UK and the USA with the objective of identifying the current trends, establishing tendencies of differences or similarities and identifying future trends (next 5 years) across the three countries. This is directed at synthesising “best practices” which could facilitate international knowledge transfer and the future development of e-learning. In pursuance of these aims the study employed the use of both quantitative and qualitative data sources. In obtaining the quantitative data, national and international reports that detail out the activities of e-learning in higher educational institutions across the three countries were reviewed and relevant data filtered. Further explanations, clarifications as well as predictions of future trends were sought through expert interviews (n=30 experts). The findings indicate that: 1) The three countries did not exhibit much differences in terms of policy however they exhibited differences in terms of strategy and tactics in e-learning. 2) The three countries exhibited differences in terms of the prevalent e-learning technologies used as well as the application of such technologies. 3) In terms of didactical approaches and orientation to either local or international markets the three countries exhibited differences iv) In terms of impact and limiting factors the three countries exhibited differences in scale and proportion though qualitative impact was difficult to estimate. 5) In terms of future trends or scenarios different projections were made across the three countries. The implications of the findings are discussed and recommendations offered for further research

Organisational culture and effectiveness: a three perspective analysis

Although a number of studies have examined organisational culture and effectiveness, such studies have often resulted in inconclusive findings. Through an intensive ethnographic case study, this study explores and analyses this relationship in the context of a knowledge-intensive firm. The study adopts the three perspective framework of organisational culture (see Martin 1992, 2002) as the theoretical framework through which the links between organisational culture and effectiveness are examined. The adoption of the three perspective framework throws rich insights into the nature of organisational life. However, although the study finds overall support for the three perspective framework, it suggests that this framework could be strengthened in regard to the conceptualisation of integration and fragmentation, particularly in the context of an organisation based in a developing country undertaking work for the MNCs. Similarly, the adoption of the different theoretical approaches to effectiveness leads to the identification of a series of interesting measures of effectiveness. In this regard, an integration based analysis highlights the certainty of the measures of effectiveness whereas the differentiation and fragmentation analyses show the problematic, inconsistent and transient nature of effectiveness. The adoption of the three perspective framework sheds interesting insights into culture effectiveness relationship. While the integration perspective presents a positive relationship, the differentiation perspective holds that the inherent inconsistencies and conflicts have a negative influence on effectiveness. The fragmentation based analysis shows that culture is a neutral factor vis-a-vis effectiveness. Furthermore, the ironies, contradictions and ambiguities are shown to have a negative influence in this regard. This work therefore concludes that the argument that there is a relationship between culture and effectiveness is the result of adopting a particular analytical lens (generally, integration perspective). This study also shows that the proposition that non-financial aspects of effectiveness mediate the relationship between organisational culture and financial performance can work only in the case of adopting an integration perspective

From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov's Canon and the Texture of Time

The library of existing scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This dissertation juxtaposes Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1825-32) with Nabokov's two most controversial monuments and investigates Nabokov's ambitions to enter a canon of Western masterpieces, re-imagined with Russian literature as a central strain. I interrogate the implied trajectory for Russian belles lettres, culminating unexpectedly in a novel written in English and after fifty years of emigration. My subject is Nabokov, but I use this hermetic author to raise broader questions of cultural borrowing, transnational literatures, and struggles with rival canons and media. Chapter One examines Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, the foundation stone of the Russian canon and a meta-literary fable. Untimely characters pursue one another and the latest Paris and London fashions in a text that performs and portrays anxieties of cultural borrowing and Russia's position vis-à-vis the West. Fears of marginalization are often expressed in terms of time: I use Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters to suggest a global context for the "belated" provinces and fashion-setting centers of cultural capital. Chapter Two argues that Nabokov's Eugene Onegin, three-quarters provocation to one-quarter translation, focuses on the Russian poet and his European sources. Nabokov reads Onegin as a masterpiece of theft and adaptation: the lengthy notes painstakingly examine precedents, especially in Byron and Chateaubriand, and evaluate for originality by comparison. When does Pushkin engage in derivative "native" imitations, and when in subtle and brilliant parody? Chapter Three concludes that Nabokov attempts his own timeless masterpiece with Ada, or Ardor. Planet Antiterra, Nabokov's personal "world republic of letters," transplants and conflates his beloved literatures. To create this Russo-Franco-Anglophone world, Ada lifts lines, characters, and fabula from Onegin but also from works by Byron and Chateaubriand. A pattern emerges of great English, French, and Russian triads; it repeats more faintly with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy (Nabokov hoped one day to translate Anna Karenina); but the most fraught iteration is Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov himself. Chapter Four looks at traces of Joyce and Proust in Ada. The two modernists serve as signs by which great readers recognize one another, as indexes to the "real" and the beautiful, and as carriers of tradition; but Ada subsumes its rivals through imitation and parody. However, the incestuous lovers Ada and Van Veen, heirs to the greatest literary traditions in the world, die childless. Is Ada a dead end, Nabokov's Finnegans Wake? Or can masterpieces interbreed indefinitely? Chapter Five examines Ada in the context of its working title, The Texture of Time. Van is a scholar of Henri Bergson, of the duration of the past into the present, and of spatial metaphors for time. Van aspires to an eternal present, but the one-way time of ordinary mortality threatens to take over the narrative. The structure of the novel mimics Zeno's paradox, famously refuted by the French philosopher: Part Two is roughly half the size of Part One, and so on. The arrow (Ardis in Greek, the name of the Veens' lost paradise) speeds towards the final target, but the Veens aim for immortality and to die into their book. Chapter Six turns to the visual arts. Nabokov's novel reads like a gallery, with Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in pride of place. Ada animates the Old Masters, but there are also no fewer than three film adaptations depicted in the novel, betraying an ongoing struggle between the media (and echoing Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov's skirmishes over Lolita the film). If it is to survive beyond inbreeding with diminishing results, the novel form must subsume more than its own recent greats. I conclude with Nabokov as an image in the work of contemporary novelists, a source and a transcultural precursor to a new generation of international writers

The Live Fashion Show in Mediatized Consumer Culture

This dissertation examines the fashion show and its mediatization as a microcosm of online medias impact on consumer culture. The contemporary fashion show is a brief, one-off live performance that presents a fashion house or brands upcoming seasonal collection to industrial insiders and invited clientele. The fashion show is the locus of communication between corporations and consumers and an arena in which commodities, personnel and industrial practices intersect. With the widespread mediatization of social life and the prevalence of digital media use in fashion in the past decade, critics mused that the live fashion show could become obsolete. Instead, its structure remains intact, and the entire circuit has mutated into an online spectacle, live streamed and proliferated in video, photographic and textual formats on multiple media platforms and applications. The fact that consumers can now see a collection at the moment of its debut marks a fundamental shift in fashion communication timeframes. Nonetheless, access to the fashion show remains limited to an elite cohort of fashion personnel, influencers and celebrities. This dissertation argues that the fashion show remains a focal event because it transmits the entire exclusive performance to an online spectatorship with an aim to build consumer desire to participate in fashion desire fulfilled in networked interactions and material purchases. I seek to here to problematize claims that the mediatization of the fashion show renders fashion democratic or accessible. To this end, I draw from performance and mediatization theories to illuminate that the fashion shows elite nature is predicated on a literal and social distinction between spectators temporal and spatial access. I perform qualitative close readings of fashion shows and transmitted footage and utilize content analysis and virtual and on-site participant observation to examine the class-based social relations that underpin and are re-asserted in mediatized fashion representations. This dissertation moreover situates the fashion show as a focal site via which to assess the social, industrial and material transformations that mediatization has effected in fashions economies

Problem space of modern society: philosophical-communicative and pedagogical interpretations. Part II

This collective monograph offers the description of philosophical bases of definition of communicative competence and pedagogical conditions for the formation of communication skills. The authors of individual chapters have chosen such point of view for the topic which they considered as the most important and specific for their field of study using the methods of logical and semantic analysis of concepts, the method of reflection, textual reconstruction and comparative analysis. The theoretical and applied problems of modern society are investigated in the context of philosophical, communicative and pedagogical interpretations

Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination

Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum on independence and amid a continuing campaign for more autonomy. Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination offers an introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. Silke Stroh shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism

Public poetry, memory, and the historical present: 1660-1745

Public Poetry, Memory, and the Historical Present: 1660-1745 examines the role public poetry played in the fashioning of social memory during the so-called Augustan age of English literature; further, it traces in the rise and decline of public poetry during this period the emergence and subsequent estrangement of two distinctive modes of public memory: one highly emblematic and allusive in nature, fostering and indeed dependent upon a well-endowed collective sense of historical and literary tradition; the other far more literal and individualistic, fashioning social memory of the historical present--the present moment set against the backdrop of historical consciousness--by encouraging a personal awareness of the immediate, prosaic realities of the everyday world. Both modes of memory, the figurative and prosaic, were made broadly available to English society at large with the rise of public poetry in the years after the Restoration. They are generally united in the work of John Dryden, whose rise as a public figure coincides with the rise of public poetry itself in England, but it was the fate of Dryden\u27s greatest literary inheritor, Alexander Pope, to preside over--even accelerate--what one might call the divorce between the figurative and literal modes of public memory, the subsequent decline of the commercial appeal and cultural authority of formal verse, and the gradual eclipse of the figurative mode of public memory, which had tended to accommodate the habits of mind and memory inculcated by poetry. This divorce coincides with the gradual supplanting of occasional, journalistic poetry (broadsheet ballads as well as formal verse) by prose journalism and the novel, but also at work were the continuing shift from orality to literacy and an evolving sensibility--rationalist, individualist, and mercantilist in nature--in which the habit of emblematic allusion to a shared historical and literary tradition ceased to be relevant and viable. In tracing the broad cultural effects of an important poetic mode, therefore, I explore an important moment in the evolution of social consciousness, a moment that stands as the proximate origin of our own habits of memory