Exiles in British sociology

We have all seen them, foreheads wrinkled like a ploughed field, pastel-shaded check summer shirts worn in winter, desks festooned with yellowed index cards covered in hieroglyphics, books like yours only in plainer covers and read more carefully, filthy cigarettes, an accent growing thicker with age. But we have all seen them too, the luxuriant thatch at seventy, the jacket and tie, the tidy desk, the London club and the house in the country, the pipe, the disdain for small talk made all the more intimidating by an English acquired somewhere between grammar school and Oxford. Self-contained in a way only the uprooted can be, mysterious because you never knew what questions to ask them, emissaries from worlds they have lost and you have never known: the Polish gentry, the central European peasantry, Jewish merchants, German workers and, most puzzling of all, the continental European middle class

Social Change and Progress in the Sociology of Robert Nisbet

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9908-

Sounds too true to be good: diegetic infidelity–the case for sound in virtual reality

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Media Practice following peer review. The version of record McArthur, A., et al. (2017). "Sounds too true to be good: diegetic infidelity – the case for sound in virtual reality." Journal of Media Practice 18(1): 26-40. is available online at:https://doi.org/10.1080/14682753.2017.1305840© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Cinematic virtual reality (VR) elicits new possibilities for the treatment of sound in space. Distinct from screen-based practices of filmmaking, diegetic sound–image relations in immersive environments present unique, potent affordances, in which content is at once imaginary, and real. However, a reductive modelling of environmental realism, in the name of ‘presence’ predominates. Yet cross-modal perception is a noisy, flickering representation of worlds. Treating our perceptual apparatus as stable, objective transducers, ignores the inter-subjective potential at the heart of immersive work, and situates users as passive spectators. This condescends to audiences and discounts the historic symbiosis of sound–image signification, which comes to constitute notions of verisimilitude. We understand the tropes; we willingly suspend disbelief. This article examines spatial sound rendering in virtual environments, probing at diegetic realism. It calls for an experimental, aesthetic approach, suggesting several speculative strategies, drawing from theories of embodied cognition and acousmatic practice (amongst others) which necessarily deal with space and time as contingencies of the immersive. VR affords a development of the dialectic between sound and image which distinctively involves our spatial attention. The lines between referent and signified blur; the mediation between representations invoked by practitioners, and those experienced by audiences, suggest new opportunities for co-authorship.The authors wish to acknowledge support from the EPSRC and AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Media and Arts Technology through Queen Mary University of London

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of West Slavic languages than among those of South Slavic languages. We found an asymmetry in Croatian-Slovene intelligibility, whereby Slovene speakers can understand written and spoken Croatian better than vice versa. Finally, we compared the three methods and found that the word translation task and the cloze test give very similar results, while the results of the picture task are somewhat unreliable

The impact of ‘exile’ on thought: Plotinus, Derrida and Gnosticism

This article examines the impact of ‘exile’ – as an individual or collective experience – on how human experience is theorized. The relationship between ‘exile’ and thought is initially approached historically by looking at the period that Eric Dodds famously called the ‘age of anxiety’ in late antiquity, i.e. the period between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine. A particular interest is in the dynamics of ‘empire’ and the concomitant religious ferment as a context in which ‘exile’, both experientially and symbolically, appears to assume an overbearing significance. Plotinus’ narrative of emanation and epistrophe as well as a group of narratives often classified as ‘Gnosticism’ are juxtaposed as two radical examples of a wider spiritual trend at the time according to which ‘exile’ could be considered constitutive of human experience. By way of an historical analogy, the insights gained from this study of late antiquity are then used to guide an analysis of the current, ‘restless’ epoch, in which experiences of displacement and exile on a mass scale undermine traditional notions of belonging, thus reviving the gnostic vision of cosmic reality as an alien, exilic environment. The article concludes with a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s work as an example of contemporary gnosticism, in which a ‘metaphysics of exile’ is presented in the disguise of an ‘exile from metaphysics’