University of Arts in Belgrade
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Democratic Innovations: A Realist Synthesis
No full textThis review synthesizes current research and practitioner perspectives on democratic innovations, funded by the European Commission since 2000, and examines their impact and effectiveness. The review employs Realist Synthesis (RS) to evaluate how these innovations enhanced inclusivity and influenced policy-making. The RS, suitable for assessing diverse contexts and combining qualitative and quantitative data, focuses on the mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes of democratic innovations. Following several rounds of manual coding of projects and documents, a final dataset was made detailing 70 documented cases. The review identified three main types of democratic innovations: consultative, deliberative, and electoral. Findings reveal that consultative innovations, such as public consultations and e-participation mechanisms, often fail to engage marginalized groups and do not significantly influence decision-making. Co-creation innovations and living labs promise to empower citizens and develop innovative solutions, but they face challenges in changing entrenched hierarchical structures. Deliberative forums and participatory budgeting enhance citizen engagement and policy legitimacy but require structured recruitment to avoid social biases. Representative deliberative mini-publics address the issue of representativeness but are resource-intensive. Finally, e-voting in elections does not increase turnout and raises concerns about security and privacy. While democratic innovations offer the potential for more inclusive policy-making, their success depends on context-specific mechanisms and addressing inherent biases in participation and power dynamics. The review suggests an important role of deliberation and suggests further research on expanding citizen engagement and refining participatory approaches to enhance democratic processes
How is the parliamentary discourse shaping identity narratives: The case of the Serbian Parliament
No full textThis paper explores the variations in identity narratives in the speeches of the Members of Parliament (MP) of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia. By analyzing the different way of framing of identity narratives promoted in the Serbian Parliament by the opposition MPs and MPs from the parliamentary majority, as well as the frequency of different identity narratives, the paper seeks to capture diverse, and often competitive identity narratives coming from the main political parties and to assess which of these narratives are more dominant, as well as to what extent these narratives mirror and how they corelate to the official political programs of political parties to which these MPs belong. For this purpose, the paper will focus on qualitative content analysis on a sample of speeches from three convocations of the Serbian Parliament in order to assess any potential changes and trends in the dominant narratives. The aim of the paper is to map and conceptualize the structure and type of key messages related to identity narratives that are being promoted by different MPs through the Serbian Parliament
Russians Post Portas: Mapping New Russian Diaspora in Serbia
No full textIn terms of their profile, Russian immigrants to Serbia are typically more educated and somewhat younger compared to the Russian population mean, with slightly more men than women arriving. Generalising slightly, the profile of the Russian immigrants could be illustrated with two typical figures: a relatively young man, with higher education, full-time employment in the IT sector and thus with income untethered
to his location, and who mostly rents a flat in Belgrade or Novi Sad. He has no fixed long-term plans and is prone to moving to the EU or west if possible, uses English to communicate and his social interactions are mostly limited to other recent Russian immigrants of similar background. The second type would be a family with a small child or children, more inclined to buy than rent, often living in a house in Vojvodina, central or western Serbia, enrolling their children in local schools and more interested in learning some Serbian and
interacting with Serbs, often through ties initiated by – and for – their children
Towards Recommender Systems LLMs Playground (RecSysLLMsP): Exploring Polarization and Engagement in Simulated Social Networks
No full textGiven the exponential advancement in AI technologies and the potential escalation of harmful effects from recommendation systems, it is crucial to simulate and evaluate these effects early on. Doing so can help prevent possible damage to both societies and technology companies. This paper introduces the Recommender Systems LLMs Playground (RecSysLLMsP), a novel simulation framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the impacts of different content recommendation setups on user engagement and polarization in social networks. By creating diverse AI agents (AgentPrompts) with descriptive, static, and dynamic attributes, we
assess their autonomous behaviour across three scenarios: Plurality, Balanced, and Similarity. Our findings reveal that the Similarity Scenario, which aligns content with user preferences, maximizes engagement while potentially fostering echo chambers. Conversely, the Plurality Scenario promotes diverse interactions but produces mixed engagement results. Our study emphasizes the need for a careful balance in recommender system designs to enhance user satisfaction while mitigating societal polarization. It underscores the unique value and challenges of incorporating LLMs into simulation environments. The benefits of RecSysLLMsP lie in its potential to calculate polarization effects, which is crucial for assessing societal impacts and determining user engagement levels with diverse recommender system setups. This advantage is essential for developing and maintaining a successful business model for social media
companies. However, the study’s limitations revolve around accurately emulating reality. Future efforts should validate the similarity in behaviour between real humans and AgentPrompts and establish metrics for measuring polarization scores. Additionally, the model’s realism can be enhanced by incorporating various types of content into the simulation and expanding the range of AgentPrompts in actual experiments. This research direction paves the way toward developing and validating more comprehensive simulation software. An additional benefit of this software is the potential to create novel recommender systems based on LLMs and produce synthetic data
for further training these models
Škola i/ili nasilje
No full textKada razmišljamo o školi i nasilju, najpre mi se čini da postoji znatna neravnopravnost između ova dva termina u ovom kontekstu – pojam škole mi se čini jasnim i konkretnim: to je institucija obrazovanja i vaspitanja, i jedan obrazovni system školstva koji čine državne institucije, deo ideološkog državnog aparata kako bi rekao Altiser.
Što se nasilja tiče, to je širok pojam koji može da znači mnogo toga, od nasilnog buđenja deteta ujutro da ide u školu, do najstrašnijih primera koje mi je teško i da izgovorim.
Stoga, najpre iznosim ovde tri tipa nasilja koji mi se čine relevantnima, a zatim ću i reći šta mislim da kao društvo i kao pojedinci možemo i treba da činimo kako bismo smanjili to nasilje
Extinction Fever
No full textFor the first time in human history, extinction has expanded into the common parlance of everyday life. Not only is it no longer special, but it has also entered into the vast machinations of the culture industry. The certainty of our extinction is, however, grounded in the paradox of the uncertainty of how it will all play out. And so, despite the seeming inevitability of extinction, its presumed factualities sound fictional and, indeed, science fiction has had a field day. The opening up of awareness of the vast time scales at play has also created a new temporal condition based on a basic truth: we, the human species, will not have time to “evolve” into something else. In other words, despite the long-drawn-out processes of our evolution, we are now stuck in the awkward fixity of our supposed “humanity” as something that is now both permanently endangered and permanently fragile
Dana Cuff, Architectures of Spatial Justice, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass./London, 2023.: Book Review
No full textGender-sensitive language, linguistic ‘truths’ and antigender mobilizations in times of ‘gender crisis’ in Serbia
No full textUntil the adoption of the Law on Gender Equality (2021) (LGE),
gender-sensitive language was primarily the subject of scholarly works
in the field of feminist linguistics and feminist activism in Serbia and
the broader region, but it did not attract the attention of the general
public. Public debates about its use emerged on the eve of the LGE in
Serbia, and intensified especially after its adoption. LGE foresaw that
the provisions on gender-sensitive language will enter into force three
years after the adoption of the law - on June 1, 2024. In response to
this, discussions about gender-sensitive language have become
increasingly more inflamed and the public has become strongly
polarized, with the involvement of powerful actors from the cultural,
social and political life of Serbia. Public opposition to gender-sensitive
language led to a broader anti-gender mobilization of various social
actors who began to demand not only the abandonment of gendersensitive
language but also the overthrow of LGE. Eventually, the
Constitutional Court in Serbia issued a decision on June 27
suspending the adoption of acts on the basis of the Law on Gender
Equality until the completion of the constitutionality assessment
procedure. The aim of the paper is to present the main ongoing public
debates and statements and to identify the key actors. Subsequently,
we analyze the themes and arguments that make up the ideological
discourse against gender-sensitive language in the public sphere,
including the scientific claims to linguistic ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’, and
wider social arguments of ‘gender crisis’ and threat. The paper uses a
critical discourse analysis that aims to provide insight into how the
arguments are interconnected and contextualized, and how they are
connected to broader anti-gender ideological discourses, anti-gender
mobilizations and contemporary discourses of crisis
Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: Collective action and humility in philosophical practice and psychotherapy
No full textIn this paper, I speak of the particular prayerful attitude that is the dynamic core of collective action in philosophical practice and psychotherapy. I use the term psychotherapy inclusively because I believe that there is no sustainable difference between the two, and that any insistence on philosophy somehow representing a separate realm of counselling that deals with “values”, as opposed to psychotherapy, which, supposedly, deals with “cerebral issues”, is untenable. Neither does philosophical counselling deal only with values, nor does psychotherapy deal only with pathology or “cerebral issues”: both deal with both. It is quite a different question whether every psychotherapist is equipped, able, or willing to address all kinds of issues in therapy, such as those of psychosis. It is a matter of knowledge, personality, sensibility, personal talent, training, and taste. Psychotherapists, however they call themselves, must deal both with values and with pathology. And they do so. Disciplinary cocoons and professional “turfs” do not change this fact of life: they serve little but to offer comfort to the practitioners. Our clients do not care what we call ourselves. They see us through our personalities, skills, and erudition, all of which determine whether or not we are able to help them. The paper argues that what facilitates inroads in philosophical counselling and in traditional psychotherapy is very much a combined sense of Lacanian insufficiency, or personal “lack”, on the one hand, and the collaborative expectation of what Maria Zambrano calls a “clearing,” of what with a religious attitude one calls a blessing or empowerment from above, on the other hand. There are major similarities between these collaborative intellectual efforts and prayer that are the crux of my argument here
Izgradnja baze podrške za organizacije građanskog društva u Srbiji
No full textIzveštaj kvalitativnog empirijskog istraživanja sprovedenog među dvadeset i pet organizacija građanskog društva u periodu mart-maj 2024. godine