Hamburg's Spaces of Danger: Race, Violence and Memory in a Contemporary Global City

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s urban boosterism relies on, while simultaneously obscuring, the same structures of racial violence that embolden reactionary movements. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Allan Pred, we present an archaeology of Hamburg’s landscape, uncovering some of its ‘spaces of danger’––sites layered with histories of violence, many of which lie buried and forgotten. We find that these spaces, when they become visible, threaten to undermine Hamburg’s cosmopolitan narrative. They must, as a result, be continually erased or downplayed in order to secure the city as an attractive site for capital investment. To illustrate this argument, we give three historical examples: Hamburg’s role in the Hanseatic League during the medieval and early modern period; the city under the Nazi regime; and the recent treatment of Black African refugees. The article’s main contribution is to better situate issues of historical landscape, collective memory and racialized violence within the political economy of today’s global city

Una mirada creativa hacia la superdotación: posibilidades y dificultades en la identificación de la creatividad [A creative look at giftedness: possibilities and difficulties in the identification of creativity]

Contains fulltext : 140327.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The present study reflects upon the identification process for gifted or highly able children through a systematic study of the literature, with the aim of providing them with an adequate and stimulating education beginning at an early age. The identification process requires an adequate diagnostic process of giftedness, and creativity is an important determining factor. Creativity, however, is a very complex construct due to differences in definition in the psychology field. This study aims to make a valuable contribution by discussing how to measure creativity in gifted or highly able children, as well as proving recommendations in the diagnostic process.24 p

Una mirada creativa hacia la superdotación: posibilidades y dificultades en la identificación de la creatividad [A creative look at giftedness: possibilities and difficulties in the identification of creativity]

The present study reflects upon the identification process for gifted or highly able children through a systematic study of the literature, with the aim of providing them with an adequate and stimulating education beginning at an early age. The identification process requires an adequate diagnostic process of giftedness, and creativity is an important determining factor. Creativity, however, is a very complex construct due to differences in definition in the psychology field. This study aims to make a valuable contribution by discussing how to measure creativity in gifted or highly able children, as well as proving recommendations in the diagnostic process

Why do judgments on different person-descriptive attributes correlate with one another? A conceptual analysis with relevance for most psychometric research

Patterns of correlations among judgments of targets on different items are the basis for common psychometric procedures such as factor analysis and network modeling. The outcomes of such analyses may shape the images (i.e., theories) that we as scientists have of the phenomena that we study. However, key conceptual issues tend to be overlooked in these analyses, which is especially problematic when the items are person descriptions espressed in the natural language. A correlation between judgments on two such items may reflect the influences of (a) a common substantive cause, (b) substantive target characteristics on another, (c) semantic redundancy, (d) the perceivers’ attitudes toward the targets, (e) the perceivers’ formal response styles, or (f) any mixture of these. We present a conceptual framework integrating all of these mechanisms and use it to connect formerly unrelated strands of theorizing with one another. A lack of awareness regarding the complexity involved may compromise the validity of interpretations of psychometric analyses. We also review the effectiveness of a broad range of solutions that have been proposed for dealing with the various influences, and provide recommendations for future research