The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
Not a member yet
3117 research outputs found
Sort by
Aesthetics
No full textIn this interview, Tim Lanzendörfer and Pierre-Héli Monot of the Academic Forms working group discuss the state of the art, and the future, of academic work and life
Let’s Talk about Language—and Its Role for Replicability
No full textScience strives towards a credible and comprehensive understanding of the world around us. Across disciplines within the social and behavioural sciences (and beyond), limitations in the implementation of the scientific approach have been identified in recent studies, showing low replicability of many results. This is an issue for knowledge accumulation, theory-building, and evidence-based decision and policy making. Researchers have proposed several solutions to address these issues, focusing mainly on improving statistical methods, data quality, and transparency. However, relatively little attention has been paid to another key aspect that affects replicability: language. Across fields, language plays a central role in all steps of the research cycle and is a critical communication tool among researchers. Neglecting its role may reduce replicability and limit our understanding of theoretically interesting differences and similarities across languages. After identifying these challenges, we provide some recommendations and an outlook on how replicability challenges related to language may be addressed
Cultural Memory versus 'Social Acceleration'
No full textA tidal continuum submerging the arts with entertainment may be traced in stages from silent film to film with sound, then color; to TV with its laugh and applause tracks; to YouTube, with its loud and irrelevant ads; to social media and the segmentation of Americans into consumers of political and cultural pabulum. The ease with which entertainment pays commercial dividends, the alacrity with which it can today be produced and acquired, are fatal enticements. At every stage, engagement grows ever more supine. Are these impediments deeply rooted in the American experience, even within the very ethos of democracy and freedom? Certainly there is an impressive lineage of writings analyzing an American aversion to artists and intellectuals. An enduring philosophical argument against the American arts was launched by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Much more recently, positing “a new theory of modernism,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls the governing dynamic “social acceleration”—and his prognoses are grim. With so much at stake, where does hope lie? Contrary to what might be thought or assumed, it cannot be said that America was never a fit home for the arts. During the Gilded Age, no one pondering issues of shared American identity would consider omitting the arts. In the decades after World War I, the arts were more widely but also more superficially acquired. I emphasize the possibilities for innovation in my own field: orchestras. They were once an American bellwether. Two recent controversies drive home the moment—the resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and the engagement of Klaus Makela as music director of the Chicago Symphony. Curating the American musical past, comparable to the efforts of art museums, remains unattempted. A case in point is the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, ignored by the major US orchestras
Classical Education and the Culture Wars
No full textThis article examines the rise of “classical education” (CE) as an educational model in the context of contemporary educational culture wars in the United States. A traditionalist educational model especially favored by Christian schools and universities, CE builds upon the prestige of learning in the texts of the ancient Mediterranean. It is increasingly promoted by educators and politicians on the right as a tool for instilling “civic virtue” and for wresting American education from the grip of secularism and left-liberal ideology. This paper explores CE’s actors, its history, its pedagogical content, and its ideological underpinnings, to show that for its champions, CE is not simply a way to return to time-honored “classics,” but to instill a conservative cultural hegemony rooted in Christian nationalism
Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19
No full textLong COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients’ experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams’s autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams’s narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives—and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them—might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research.Wellcome Trusthttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010269Koneen Säätiöhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/50110000578
A Comparison and a Mapping
No full textWhile scholarly research on green public procurement (GPP) keeps growing, until now it has paid little attention to museums that must make decisions about GPP implementation. This paper breaks new ground by exploring GPP implementation in the most visited European museums. The proposed conceptual framework allows a comparison and a mapping of museums’ GPP implementation levels while taking account of how these levels are related to the national GPP performance. Complementing this framework with the analysis of the up-to-date data from the Tender Electronic Daily database yields two central findings. First, museums that formalized their GPP policies in their strategic organizational documents exhibit higher levels of GPP implementation than other museums that have not done so. Second, the majority of the investigated museums follow national trends of GPP implementation, with examples of exceeding or falling below these trends being rare. The article is important for policy makers and practitioners as it highlights the importance of the factor of institutionalization of green procurement in individual organizations, which is crucial for successful implementation of green procurement
Identifying the Underlying Psychological Constructs from Self-Expressed Anti-vaccination Argumentation
No full textPeople’s negative attitudes to vaccines can be motivated by psychological factors—such as fears, ideological beliefs, and cognitive patterns—known as ‘attitude roots’. This study had two primary objectives: (1) to identify which of 11 known attitude roots are featured in individuals’ self-expressed reasons for negative vaccine attitudes (i.e., a linguistic analysis); (2) to explore how attitude roots present in self-expressed texts are linked to specific psychological measures. To achieve Objective 1, our study collected data from December 2022 to January 2023 from 556 participants from the US, who wrote texts to explain the reasons for their negative vaccine attitudes. The texts encompassed 2327 conceptually independent units of anti-vaccination argumentation, that were each coded for its attitude root(s) by at least two psychological experts. By allowing participants to spontaneously express their attitudes in their own words, we were able to observe how this differed from what participants reported to endorse when presented with a list of arguments. We found that there were four groups of attitude roots based on linguistic similarity in self-expression. In addition, latent class analysis of participants’ coded texts identified three distinct groups of participants that were characterised by their tendency to express combinations of arguments related to (1) fears, (2) anti-scientific conceptions, and (3) politicised perspectives. To achieve Objective 2, we collected participants’ responses to 11 validated measures of psychological constructs expected to underlie the respective 11 attitude roots, and used a correlational design to investigate how participants’ self-expressed attitude roots were linked to these measures. Logistic regressions showed that an expected psychological construct was the strongest, and significant, predictor for expression of three out of the four attitude root groups. We discuss the implications of these findings for health communicators and practitioners
Immortality and Ecocriticism in Brandon Sanderson’s 'Elantris'
No full textBrandon Sanderson’s Elantris (2005) exemplifies how fantasy fiction may reflect on the contemporary way of life, as the immortal protagonists’ situation in the novel comments on the present depression epidemic and its relation to the entanglement of the urban and nature. Further, the notion of nature and human being opposites is negated, and their oneness foregrounded instead. Based on the idea of a coexistence in symbiosis, the importance of humanity’s connectedness to nature and the urban environment is highlighted. By drawing upon the notion of an extended self, Sanderson presents his readers with a work that is in line with deep ecology.Brandon Sandersons Elantris (2005) verdeutlicht, inwiefern sich Fantasy auf heutige Lebensweisen beziehen und diese reflektieren kann. Die Situation der Unsterblichen kommentiert dabei die gegenwärtige Depressionsepidemie im Zusammenhang mit der Verflechtung von Mensch, Stadt und Natur. Hier wird die Vorstellung, dass Natur und Mensch Gegensätze sind, negiert und stattdessen ihre Einheit in den Vordergrund gestellt. Auf Grundlage der Idee von Koexistenz in Symbiose wird die Bedeutung der Verbundenheit des Menschen sowohl mit der Natur als auch mit der städtischen Umwelt hervorgehoben. Der Idee des erweiterten Selbst folgend, spiegeln sich in Elantris Ansätze der deep ecology