IN A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING MORE DEEPLY & COMPREHENSIVELY THE QUESTION OF LEADERSHIP IN THE SOVIET POLITICAL SYSTEM, THE ROLES & FUNCTIONS OF THE TOP LEADER WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP ARE CONSIDERED; SO IS THE PROBLEMATIC RELATIONSHIP OF THE LEADERSHIP TO THE PARTY ELITE & OTHER FUNCTIONAL ELITES IN ADOPTING & IMPLEMENTING MAJOR POLICIES.
Abstract In its heyday, motorcycle speedway packed stadiums on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Via archival research, oral history, and fieldwork in multiple states this essay argues that speedway is uniquely placed to complicate tired Cold War binaries. Regardless of prevailing political systems, it thrived in provincial settings, as tours, itinerant riders, and machinery ensured regular interactions between speedway's 'entangled peripheries'. When small-town Swedes and aspirant Soviets challenged the British Commonwealth's on-track dominance, this sport born at the imperial margins thrust Muslim riders from the Russian step into the limelight, and Australasian world champions harnessed superior Czechoslovak engineering.
This paper explores two reddit communities that supported Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, respectively, in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential election campaign. Much of the paper is dedicated to explaining how reddit functions, describing the behaviour of the subreddit communities in question and then asking whether these demonstrated collective intelligence. Subreddit communities submit and vote on content, through their votes they make collective decisions about which content will be broadcast to their community. Large subreddit communities that formed rapidly to support a candidate in an election have not previously been observed on reddit—these offered an interesting context for the consideration of whether subreddit communities demonstrate collective intelligence. Voting is a key determinant of what happens on each subreddit and it is conducted anonymously, it is, therefore, not possible to understand the role(s) that every individual plays in the functioning of the subreddit. The behaviour of these subreddit communities can only be understood as a collective of submitting, commenting, voting and moderating participants. Whether these collectives behave intelligently is a matter of how one defines intelligence—but it is clear that they can be effective in pursuing certain ends. These collectives encounter and sometimes oppose each other on reddit. The community of Trump supporters in particular were in conflict with a number of other high-profile communities on the site, and also the platform's administrators. ; This work is supported by the WikiRate FP7 project, partially funded by the EC under Contract No. 609897.
Inspired by microhistory, this essay explores the wartime plight of a football stadium and the multi-ethnic club that called it home as a means of understanding Bosnia and Herzegovina's descent into conflict, the siege of Sarajevo, and the impact upon civilians. Like the suburb of the same name, Grbavica became part of the frontline during the siege. Deprived of its home, FK Željezničar continued to function, while players, staff, and supporters longed for a return to the shattered ground. At a local level, the organization offers a means of visualizing the development of the Grbavica suburb, from its socialist foundations to its post-Dayton reintegration. In this way, the life of the stadium and those who frequent it map onto the history of Yugoslavia, its dissolution, and the independent republic that emerged in its wake. Moreover, the wartime partition of the stadium, the club, and its supporters' group – all of which were claimed by actors on both sides of the frontline – were representative of political developments in a state where the ethnic balance was forcibly reengineered. This reconstruction of Grbavica's war harnesses original photographic evidence, oral history, maps, contemporary journalism, and the transcripts of the Hague Tribunal.
Abstract David Bowie's Glam transformation between 1969 and 1972 was a personal reinvention that saw his music move away from psychedelic folk and the show tunes of his first two albums to the staging of his alter ego Ziggy Stardust on the album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Music was only one ingredient in this transformation. In this period, Bowie's image also changed radically. His 1969 stage persona of a bubble-perm haircut and hippie psychedelic shirts was replaced by the space-alien imagery of the character Ziggy Stardust: a sequinned onesie, platform-heeled boots, dyed red spiky hair, foundation, rouge and lipstick, which helped to shift Rock music in a theatrical direction. The years under consideration, 1969 to 1972, are important because Bowie's metamorphosis from hippie love-child to alien, Glam rocker epitomize the cultural shift in popular music fashion from the 1960s to the 1970s. Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars along with Roxy Music's eponymous first album are the death-knell for 1960s popular cultural fashion. The 1960s look of love-beads, kaftans, denim and long hair was replaced with a more self-consciously theatrical look in the 1970s: Bowie's performativity in 1972 was a dressing-up in flamboyant costumes in stark contrast to the 1960s street fashion of dressing-down in faded denim and corduroy.
