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The ‘new’ invisible Landscapes of Covid-19
Full text linkThe landscape is the result of the relationship between the perception of a subject and an object. Such phenomena, in times of Covid-19, assume a new ‘invisible’ form, where the microscopic dimension re-orients our way of using the space, influencing a consolidated idea of the landscape. Everywhere, at the first alarm, some form of self-protection will be triggered, making the ‘ordinary’ landscapes uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. However, there is also something positive in this unforeseen critical period. It is the emergence of territories able to play an antagonistic role in the spread of coronavirus. Spaces that were more marginalized territorial forms can now assume a unique, central role. The residual and enclosed space of large metropolitan areas appears as the centre of a new landscape design hypothesis, where new grounds impose themselves as antagonists to the dynamics that represent the crisis of our territories
Western Balkans and the Internal Integration Processes
Full text linkWith the European flag, Germany is making great efforts to effect the Western Balkans’ internal integration, but obviously the resistance from the countries of the region is very strong. Finally, the Americans are preparing to convince Western Balkan leaders, with the “stick and carrot”, that their mutual integration in the region is not only beneficial for regional economic development but also for preserving world peace. Creating an economic or customs union would have multiple positive effects. The goal is to open a market of about twenty million people, which would vividly revive industry, commerce, agriculture, livestock, tourism, and so on. It would also greatly increase foreign investment. Above all, nations will have to come together in order to boost the region’s economic development, as well as regional peace and stability. Given the real conditions in the region, which are specific by their nature, the key questions arise – to what extent is this possible, what are the means and ways of achieving this, and in what dynamics is it likely to occur? To be able to give an appropriate answer to this complexity, we have primarily used the comparative analysis method, but also the method of critical review by several authors
School-family cooperation through different forms of communication in schools during the Covid-19 pandemic
Full text linkCreating and developing a partnership between schools and families is a topic of many discussions among the scholars in the field of education, so the partnership with the parents is necessary to raise the quality in education because the family plays an important role in the process of learning and children’s development. The partnership seems to be more necessary at the time when distance learning occurred lately which was imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to pay attention to the forms of communication that are applied by school directors and teachers in relation to the parents, as well as to understand the planning and the realization of the partnership for the meetings and the reasons of organizing those discussions between teachers and parents during a school year in both junior and senior high schools. Through the data analysis it has been understood that application of the suitable forms of communication has a positive impact in school-family partnership and school-family partnership is more satisfying in junior high schools than in senior high schools. It is concluded that direct forms of partnership must be planned and applied in both junior and senior high schools considering that they induce positive results in problem solving and decision making together with the parents. Also, there must be strategies to increase school-family partnership especially in the senior high school education in order to make parents and teachers aware of the importance of the partnership in special situations during the COVID-19 pandemic
Queer Pedagogy and Engaging Cinema in LGBTQIA+ Discourse in Africa
Full text linkPostmodernism ignited a rapid growth in oppositional cultures in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Among these oppositions are feminism, animal right movements and queer culture. The oppositional forces, silenced by the power, discourse, and knowledge of dominant cultures, countercultures strive to speak for themselves and resist all forms of subjugation and marginalization. In the West, oppositional cultures have been able to create a queer cinema of resistance. African queer cinematic engagement came late with Mohammed Camara’s 1997 film-Dakan, believed to be the first film to focus primarily on LGBTQIA+ themes from West Africa. Ever since the above film pushed the queer sexual orientation into the center of discourse in Africa, film industries such as Nigeria’s Nollywood and Ghana’s Ghollywood and the South African film enterprise have followed suit. The questions that emanate in this study are, do these narratives on new sexual identities-LGBTQIA truly reflect indigenous African ethos? Is queer cinema germane in creating spaces for new sexual identities in Africa? Against this backdrop, this study examines African queer cinema as a struggle against heteronormative and oppressive tendencies. Employing Michel Foucault’s perspective on knowledge, power and discourse as theory, this study uses content analysis to interrogate selected African
Article received on the 29th of February, 2020. Article accepted on the 16th of May, 2020. Conflict of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest
Leader-driven Change from Aquino to Duterte: Towards a Redirection or Restructuring in Philippine Foreign Policy?
Full text linkThe global perceptions of leaders have significant influence in a state’s foreign policy. In the Philippines’ case, the striking contrast between Presidents Benigno Aquino III, who possesses a moralist and liberalist views, and Duterte, who holds a legalist and realist global perceptions, led to significant changes in their foreign policies. These are evident in their conflicting stance on two cases involving the death penalty of a Filipino worker in Indonesia in 2013; and the country’s maritime arbitration case with China filed in 2013 and eventually won in 2016. Their divergence caused important leader-driven changes, which may result in either a redirection or a restructuring in the country’s foreign policy
Integrating culture in ELT using an indigenous folktale, Poireiton Khunthok
Full text linkLanguage, literature and culture are interdependent and their contributions to the teaching and learning of a second language are immense. The study aims at examining the purviews of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach to teach language skills and culture. As CLIL has a dual focused learning approach, it seeks to examine the various possibilities of using the folk narratives of Poireiton Khunthok as the main teaching material to integrate the teaching of English language skills and culture. Poireiton Khunthok is a folktale of Manipur, a state in India which describes the long journey of Poireiton’s migration and settlement from the netherworld Burmese side to Manipur. The study was conducted with the students of one of the schools of Manipur. The testing of the language skills was conducted with the student participants using the pre-test and post-test method. In the pre-test method, a conventional prose prescribed by the Board of Secondary Education Manipur was used. In the post-test method, the folk narrative of Poireiton Khunthok adopting the CLIL approach was used. The study indicated that the CLIL approach using the indigenous material assisted in developing the English language skills as well as understanding culture
The Concept of Necropolitics during the Pandemic of Covid-19 in Brazil
Full text linkThe present article aims to reflect the access to health in Brazil, especially in the current context of the Covid-19 pandemic, establishing theoretical and conceptual paradigms between the fields of biopolitics and necropolitics. In this context, this study analyses the political discourses during the pandemic of Covid
19 in Brazil. The methodology comes from a bibliographic review, based on the hypothetical-deductive method, mostly based on the concept of necropolitics. Finally, it has been observed that even more dangerous than the virus itself is the necropolitical perspective that dictates who lives and who dies – in this case, who breathes and who suffocates – the nation’s economy over human lives. It’s also been verified that the admission of certain health protocols, under the bioethical perspective, portray the death policy that dictates who lives and who dies in a State completely ineffective in its political, social and even economic dimensions
Coronavirus–inspired Metaphors in Political Discourse
Full text linkIn the face of the great danger posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, political leaders worldwide, speaking from a position of authority, delivered carefully crafted televised speeches and press conferences, intended to inform the public about the pandemic, its implications and the preventive restrictions they were imposing. The main objective of this paper is to investigate how politicians used language, particularly metaphors, when
talking about and interpreting the newly created situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the purposes of this study a corpus was compiled of coronavirus-related speeches delivered by several key world political figures – Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, and Emanuel Macron. The speeches were delivered on a timeline from March to May 2020, i.e. the period that saw the inception, the peak and the gradual withdrawal of the first ‘wave’ of the coronavirus in Europe and the United States. A contrastive analysis of the speeches was carried out in order to detect similarities and differences in the
use of metaphors on the part of the politicians, at the three specific time points of the pandemic’s trajectory
Museums of Scarcity and Art Deserts
Full text linkWe review the unwillingness of artistic institutions to engage with their audiences as mirrored in their incapacity to develop meaningful alternatives to art access during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences. An analysis of the pandemic offerings of some of the biggest museums in the world will allow us to identify their perceived offerings and their understanding of their function in society in contrast with their
own statements of purpose. As the cost of accessing any cultural manifestation decreases, we turn from an economy of scarcity to an economy of visual consumption where there is an abundance of resources and attention is scarce. Art institutions and their
encircling dynamics of limitation become less interesting for the public, and this results in the exclusion of art from the semantic bubble of a great part of the population