The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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“Making America Gothic Again: Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s 'Democracy in America' Today”
No full textFew historical phenomena seem less gothic than democracy, an ideal that is virtually always figured in terms of rational enlightenment and transparency, all of which made the January 6th insurrection in Washington especially unsettling: an interruption, not just of the important business of the day but of the most fundamental progressivist narratives of western civilization. But there have been other, more ominous accounts of democracy that would have figured these events more as a culmination than an interruption of the larger historical forces at work. Writing in the aftermath of the insurrection, this paper returns to Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning in Democracy in America that however precious, democracy was not the antithesis of despotism but an historically specific set of conditions that lent themselves to new, more insidious forms of despotism which would “degrade men without tormenting them.” Confronted with the spectre of this unprecedented form of oppression, Tocqueville warned in classic gothic terms that its greatest threat may have been its obscurity: “the old words of despotism and of tyranny do not work. The thing is new, so I must try to define it since I cannot name it.” It was, by all measures, a classic gothic tale: democracy as the basis for rather than safeguard against unprecedented and even unnameable forms of tyranny. This paper asks how Tocqueville’s warning can better understand our own highly polarized political situation today
How Flamenco Undresses Granada; Santiago Teaching Me the History of Flamenco Guitar; Jacinto Praises the City of Hidden Water
No full textthree poems by Cyrus Cassell
Machine Learning Analysis of Student, Parental, and School Efforts
No full textUnderstanding what predicts students’ educational outcomes is crucial to promoting quality education and implementing effective policies. This study proposes that the efforts of students, parents, and schools are interrelated and collectively contribute to determining academic achievements. Using data from the China Education Panel Survey conducted between 2013 and 2015, this study employs four widely used machine learning techniques, namely, Lasso, Random Forest, AdaBoost, and Support Vector Regression, which are effective for prediction tasks—to explore the predictive power of individual predictors and variable categories. The effort exerted by each group has varying impacts on academic exam results, with parents’ demanding requirements being the most significant individual predictor of academic performance; the category of school effort has a greater impact than parental and student effort when controlling for various social-origin-based characteristics; and significant gender differences among junior high students in China, with school effort exhibiting a greater impact on academic achievement for girls than for boys, and parental effort showing a greater impact for boys than for girls. This study advances the understanding of the role of effort as an independent factor in the learning process, theoretically and empirically. The findings have substantial implications for education policies aimed at enhancing school effort, emphasizing the need for gender-specific interventions to improve academic performance for all students.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.China Scholarship Council http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004543Freie Universität Berlin (1008
Tracing a Motif And Metaphor of Expert Knowledge Through Audiovisual Images of the Financial Crisis
No full textBased on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close‐ups of expressive faces vis‐à‐vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face‐screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge
