8665 research outputs found
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‘A peaceful little object’: An interview with Amos Gitai on 'House'
Full text linkWhen the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad invited Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai to stage his documentary trilogy House (1980, 1998, 2005) at the Théâtre national de la Colline in 2023, geopolitical animosities made way for artistic solidarities. In this article and interview, I explore how Gitai’s play critiques the violent logics of home and homelands, exploring how a commandeered house in West Jerusalem plays host to the multidirectional memory of violent Jewish and Palestinian erasure. Stones become metonyms of the Israel–Palestine conflict: as they are quarried, chiselled, split, cemented, and erected, they testify to the construction of homes that also become tools of destruction, expulsion, and mutual ontological violence (Kotef, 2020). Drawing on an interview I conducted with Gitai in July 2023, and his Collège de France lectures from 2018 to 2019, I read his archaeological journey into the remains of this Arab-Jewish house as a call to hospitality (Derrida, 1997): troubling the subject positions of host and hostage that both underpin and impede a ‘chez soi’
Ambiente
Full text linkA study of the evolution of the term and notion of "ambiente" (Italian for environment) from classical antiquity to the 19th century, with a focus on semantic changes in the early modern period
Millikan’s Consistency Testers and the Cultural Evolution of Concepts
Full text linkRuth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future.
If human cognition does indeed include such a capacity, its operation will be an important determinant of how people use concepts. It will have a major impact on which concepts they deploy and which means of application (conceptions) they rely on. Since consistency testers are a selection mechanism at the heart of conceptual thinking, they would be crucial to understanding how concepts are selected – why some are retained and proliferate and others die out. Hence, whether consistency testers for concepts exist, and how they operate, is an important question for those seeking to understand the cultural evolution of concepts, and of the words we use to express them
Fears of Enchantment: Advertising Theory in Britain and the Making of a Modern Myth
Full text linkThis article examines the first emergence of theories of advertising in the psychological language of the nonrational mind in Britain. The theories appeared from the close of the nineteenth century in a new genre of advertising literature: books, essays, pamphlets, course offerings, and periodical publications dedicated to advertising. In dialogue with a forgotten 1911 novel by Oliver Onions, Good Boy Seldom: A Romance of Advertisement, the analysis considers the anxieties that attended the new theories, which attributed unusual power to advertising and therefore challenged perceptions of the capitalist economy as disenchanted and disenchanting. It also shows the efforts that professional advertisers made to reconcile their theories with views of consumers as rational, and of the advertising industry itself as a rationalizing force. Their efforts suggest a misinterpretation by Onions and critics of advertising that he foreshadowed, who portrayed advertising professionals as bold canvassers of the public psyche. In fact, they were insecure and uncomfortable with their terms of expertise, and developed them because mounting criticisms leveled at advertising left them little choice. Nonetheless, Onions captured the lasting power of this transformation. Despite their insecurity, early professionals created a myth still harbored today, that advertisers are masters of subliminal control in capitalism
Applying the New Burden of Proof: Lessons from the Canadian Experience
Full text linkAs a result of recent amendments to the UK Nationality and Borders Act asylum seekers will now have to establish certain facts to a balance of probabilities. This paper discusses the impact of those changes and drawing on the Canadian jurisprudence, which has applied the balance of probabilities standard to factual issues since 1989, distinguishes between those issues that have to be established to the higher balance of probabilities threshold and those for which the lower standard of risk, “the reasonable risk of persecution” should be used
George D. Smith (1870-1920), Bernard Alfred Quaritch (1871-1913) and the Trade in Medieval European Manuscripts in the USA c. 1890-1920
No full textThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw significant growth in the trade in medieval manuscripts in North America and the creation of well-known libraries including the Huntington, Morgan and Walters collections. The men who gave their names to those institutions loom large in the history of collecting, but their libraries would not have been possible without the networks of booksellers who supplied them. The latter included the American George D. Smith and the Briton Bernard Alfred Quaritch. Both men have received some attention from scholars, although much of what is known about them has been based on sources created by those involved in the trade. This essay compares the lives of these two men to examine their actions, motivations and the consequences of these for the movement of medieval manuscripts and the development of collections in the USA
Wine and the vine in ancient Italy: an archaeological approach
Full text linkThis chapter surveys and synthesises the latest evidence for winemaking and viticulture in ancient Italy, from the prehistoric era through Late Antiquity. It combines various forms of archaeological evidence, including art historical and scientific analysis, drawn from across the Italian peninsula to assess the role, scale and development of wine and the grapevine in social, cultural and economic terms
Description, translation and process: Making the implicit explicit in digital editions of ancient text-bearing objects
Full text linkDigital editions of ancient texts and objects follow the nineteenth–twentieth century tradition of academic editing, but are able to be more explicit and accessible than their print analogues. The use of digital standards such as EpiDoc and Linked Open Data, that emphasise interoperability, linking and sharing, enables—we shall argue, obliges—the scholarly editor to make the digital publication open, accessible, transparent and explicit.
We discuss three axes of openness: 1. The edition encodes dimensions and physical condition of the inscribed object, as well as photographs and other imagery, and should include translations to modern languages, rather than assuming fluency. 2. Contextual and procedural metadata include the origins of scholarly work, permissions, funding, influences on academic decision-making, material and intellectual property, trafficking, ethics, authenticity and archaeological context. 3. The digital standards and code implementing them, enabling interoperability among editions and projects, and depend on consistency and accessible documentation of practices, guidelines and customisations. Standards benefit from training in scholarly and digital methods, and the nurturing of a community to preserve and encourage the sustainable re-use of standards and editions.
Ancient text-bearing objects need to be treated as material artefacts as well as the bearers of (sometimes abstract or immaterial) strings of historical text. All elements of the publication of both object and text are interpretive constructs. It is essential that we not neglect any of the material or immaterial information in all of these components, in our scholarly quest to make them explicit, interoperable and machine actionable
Digital Identity: Emerging Trends, Debates and Controversies
Full text linkBuilding on the extended bibliography that formed part of our Women In Identity Human Impact report, and the rapid development of the digital identity since initial publication, we decided to commission a dedicated literature review to support our work in developing a Global ID Code of Conduct. This review, written by Dr Eve Hayes de Kalaf (University of London) and Kimberly Fernandes (University of Pennsylvania), summarises the emerging trends, debates and controversies surrounding digital identities. The authors look at global examples of how digital identity is working in practice, and re-iterate the requirements for inclusive and equitable solutions that work for all
Skilled Refugees Integration into the UK Labour Market
Full text linkWar in the Middle East, especially Syria, recently led to a significant refugee increase in the United Kingdom. Almost 29,000 people were settled in the U.K., mainly from Syria. But the 2021 report shows that the number had dropped to around 12,000, thus making 43% of the refugees who were granted refuge in the United Kingdom in 2020. Therefore, as much as the numbers are dropping, it is clear that there are still Syrian refugees moving to the UK as of 2021 (House of Commons (2022). For these reasons, the research analyses the challenges influencing employment accessibility of skilled refugees in the UK, evaluates how the integration of skilled Syrian refugees impacts UK’s labour market and the economy, and determines how the failure of the UK government to recognize refugee credentials complicates their ability to get decent jobs.
Skilled refugees, in this case, are Syrian refugees who are academically qualified, experienced, and also meet UK’s labour market requirements. The research used the quantitative approach, but there were some minimal instances where the qualitative research approach was applied. Information was gathered from 20 respondents from the UK’s skilled refugees, and the respondents were selected randomly through probability sampling to avoid biases. The primary data for this study was collected with the help of a questionnaire. The findings first provided a comprehensive conclusion that age, language, education, experience, gender, culture, length of stay, and social networks influence the employment accessibility of refugees. For instance, it was also found that skilled refugees’ age hindered refugees under 26 years old since they had not acquired the required experience, especially in medicine, engineering, and technology-related jobs. Besides, skilled refugees over 65 were also not considered in the labour market because the UK’s Employment Equality (Age) Regulations set the retirement age to 65. That notwithstanding, language was a hindrance because skilled refugees were good in Arabic and not English, the common language in the U.K., thus making it hard for them to secure professional employment (Jamil et al., 2012).
Regarding gender, most skilled refugees were limited by the Islamic culture that does not allow women to work unless they are working from home. The length of stay and social networks also hindered skilled refugees from Syrian being absorbed into the UK’s labour market because of their limitations in personal relationships and social interactions. According to Hogan (2017), social interactions improve the ability of people to keep and find jobs meaning that skilled Syrian refugees will be limited in securing employment.
Skilled Syrian refugees in the UK also faced challenges of accreditations from Syrian not being recognized in the UK and lack of job readiness skills and sponsorship. But it was also concluded that this was improvable through the government and relevant organizations identifying credentials from the former country, offering refresher courses in subjects like computers, developing programs that can assist refugees in getting jobs, the introduction of policies that can enable skilled refugees to get recognized as equals and offering adequate sponsorship especially when it comes to education and employment in professional jobs