1,720,982 research outputs found
‘I Rap Therefore I Am’ : Second Generation Rappers and Italian Citizenship
Full text linkThe 2019 ‘Sanremo’ Music Festival has stimulated a heated debate on immigration and Italy’s so-called liberal pro-immigrant elites, as the winner, Alessandro Mahmoud, a 26-year-old rapper born in Milan, is the son of an Italian mother and an Egyptian immigrant, to whom he ‘dedicated’ his win- ning song, ‘Soldi’ (Money) that speaks about irresponsible fathers. A rapper with an Arabic name winning Italy’s most famous festival has shocked many Italians who were used to seeing in Sanremo a reassuring representation of the old traditional canzone italiana. His victory was unexpected in a country, in which anti-immigrant attitudes are becoming mainstream, and the League’s movement is deliberately whipping up this nationalist wind. However, Mah- moud represents only the tip of the iceberg as since 2005 a number of so called ‘second generation rappers’ has been growing in Italy, who are using their lyrics to talk about personal and collective discrimination’ experiences. Through a text analysis of the most prominent second generation rap writers, this chapter aims at detecting the claims for belonging they attach to this musicalized social and political forum, shedding light on the question of Italian citizenship that is still denied to second generation young people
Rethinking Academic Teaching at and beyond the Pandemic
No full textIn the Knowledge Societies, Higher Education (HE) has had to reconcile its educational role with the challenges of promoting employability and social cohesion. This changing mission has influenced the academic teachers who have to shift from their role of “instructor” and content-transmitter towards a student-centered teaching approach. What does this educational aim mean in the time of the pandemic? In this chapter, we discuss the set of skills and reflective practices that HE teachers need to develop in order to face the challenges that have emerged during the Covid-19 emergency
The analysis of youth participation in contemporary literature: a European perspective
No full textToday in Europe, the participation of young people in the decision-making process appears crucial to public authorities for a number of reasons. The crisis of trust and confidence towards traditional forms of representation (as shown both by the growth of abstention but also by the change or even the disengagement from the classical forms of associative and union mobilization), the growth of individualisation, the building of more varied and uncertain biographical trajectories, the appearance of an unsettled and weakened sense of belonging to the national and local communities, these factors encourage public authorities to rally specifically round the young generations. However, the participation of young people remains an ambivalent political concern. References to participation can be interpreted as a key concept for an understanding of social integration in modern and late modern societies in which the actions and choices of the individuals – in their role as citizens – play an essential role in terms of influence, involvement and active citizenship it. According to the White Paper, ‘Young people want the right to give their opinion on all aspects of their daily lives, such as family, school, work, group activities, their local area, etc. However, in doing so, they are also involved in broader economic, social and political issues.’ (European Commission, 2001, p 24) This quotation reflects the awareness of a change in the way social integration has become politically institutionalised in terms of a citizenship status; from members of society based on formally assigned rights and responsibilities towards a diversification of involvement possibilities and influence in late modern societies. One may also speak of an individualisation of governance. Consequently, participation in the White Paper is defined as ‘Ensuring young people are consulted and more involved in the decisions which concern them and, in general, the life of their communities.’ (European Commission, 2001, p 8)
This volume aims at investigating the meaning and the forms, the extent and conditionality of young people’s active citizenship. What conditions are imposed on young people’s citizenship? How are young people treated in a society that promotes citizenship in this sense?
The varied definitions of participation and the implications of differing forms of participation will therefore require exploration. Thus, the issue of participation itself represents an intellectual challenge, particularly in relation to the multiplicity of meanings this concept has acquired at regional, national and European levels. As Percy-Smith and Thomas underline in the introduction of their Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation (2010), the concept of participation is still ‘in search of definition’, therefore, a core objective of this book is to analyse the relationships and tensions between institutionalised and newly emerging forms of participation.
This becomes more important as, even on the European policy level, we find not only different but contradicting statements on the relevance and meaning of participation. On the one hand, the 2001 White Paper to some extent accepts that participation means to accept social change towards new and unknown forms of society – which implies accepting uncertainty: ‘We are expecting them [young people] to create new forms of social relations, different ways of expressing solidarity or of coping with differences and finding enrichment in them, while new uncertainties appear.’ (European Commission, 2001, p 4)
On the other hand, in the follow-up process of the White Paper and especially in the framework of the European Youth Pact, participation is much more related to the existing societal structures and institutions.
The question of participation also represents a political challenge. If young people do not behave as active citizens in these areas, it damages the political legitimacy of these institutions (Giddens, 199..
Comparing the Views of Students, Parents and Teachers on the Emerging Notion of Relevance of Education
No full textThe analysis has based on the concept of ‘cultural arbitrary’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1971).
In this perspective, dominant ideas on education are the result of the ability of particular dominant group or groups to impose their own conception of ‘culture’ or ‘relevance’ as ‘cultural arbitraries’, which may be expected to reflect their own interests (cfr. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Bourdieu and Passeron emphasise that it is largely the educational system that institutionalizes these cultural arbitraries; for instance in the form of making them into qualifications, and by making the allocation of those qualifications appear as results of individual ability (or the lack of them). The specific content of the dominant cultural or linguistic form – or cultural capital – is less important for Bourdieu’s theory than the mere existence of an arbitrary standard which is recognized as legitimate even by those unable to perform it. Lower-class students do not in general possess these traits, so the failure of the majority of these students is inevitable, but explained as ‘natural’ rather than socio-politically constructed. Therefore, for Bourdieu, educational credentials help to reproduce and legitimate social inequalities, as higher-class individuals are seen to deserve their privileged access to them.
Bourdieu (1990) also forged the concept of ‘habitus’, which is a system of durable (once formed, they last throughout the lifetime) and transportable dispositions inculcated by objective structural conditions (such as family background and experiences and ways of seeing the world). Crucially, the habitus is seen as being embodied, and as generating practices for members of particular social groups (and it should be noted that all social groups have their own habituses, not just the socially disadvantaged; indeed these habitueses are what distinguish the academically, socially and economically successful) (Bourdieu, 1990). Bourdieu sees school as a productive ‘locus of habitus’, which gives rise to patterns of thought, which ‘organise reality by directing and organising thinking about reality by directing and makes what he thinks thinkable for him as such and in the particular form in which it is thought’ (1971, 194-5), so that ‘it may be assumed that every individual owes to the type of schooling he has received a set of basic deeply interiorised master patterns’ (ibid, 192-3). Thus, together, the cultural arbitrary and the habitus powerfully, though not automatically or definitively, shape conceptions of educational relevance. In essence, the cultural arbitrary means that everyone is led to want the same things, and the habitus means that they all have different and durable, capacities to achieve those ends
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
