Suchergebnisse

This project follows the story of Reira Isla, a princess coming of age in an isolationist, and very conservative, kingdom. Her tale explores the expansive effects of religion on society and how it is capable of influencing social norms, relationships, and politics without directly intending to. The goal of writing Reira and the society she inhabits is to deconstruct biases related to religion and analyze how it influences all aspects of life. This, in turn, will bring awareness of these issues in the real world to the audience. The major focus of the story involves closely following characters and their navigation of their identities in relation to the world around them. While religious bias is the main theme, religion also bleeds into social issues related to race, gender, and the LGBT+ community. Reira's story, in particular, focuses on how a queer, mixed race woman in a position of power navigates her identity through social expectation and prejudice.

Legal processes of lustration have been carried out unevenly in the wake of Eastern Europe's communist regimes. In countries where legal and political will is lacking, writers have carried out a role of literary lustration, occupying the empty spaces in civic consciousness and contributing to the rebuilding of social trust. The work of leading Albanian writer Ismail Kadare represents a contemporary case study in literary lustration. In his post-communist novels, Kadare seeks to rebuild a national narrative by exploring the effects of the past on the present and seeking truth, if not necessarily justice, in his country's immediate past. Kadare's post-communist novels chronicle the ongoing psychological and social effects of the dictatorship as the past is held to account for the aberrations of the present. Kadare recognizes the human aspects of loss and oppression, showing their political and social consequences for a nation battling to emerge from its traumatic past.

Political parties are under increasing pressure to extend and activate their voter bases by employing more innovative communication strategies. This article focuses on the social media platform Twitter to explore how well Swiss parties performed in terms of employing digital communication during the 2015 federal election campaign. As such, it uses the follower network as an indicator of organizational cohesion, along with two indicators of programmatic coherence based on Twitter message content. Computing density and centrality statistics allow for the quantification of these two aspects in the party networks, while the nonparametric bootstrap introduces uncertainty of the account sampling process into the analysis. Our results suggest that smaller and newer parties, as well as the Social Democrats, tend to exhibit disproportionally high levels of organizational cohesion. At the same time, most parties show comparable—and also disproportionately low—levels of programmatic coherence compared to those displayed by the Social Democrats.

This report offers an account of an international workshop held at the Omar Bongo University in Libreville, Gabon, from 23 November to 27 November 2018. Bringing together specialists on and from Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, participants reflected on the ways in which different forms of violence have historically had – and continue to have – an impact on social fabrics and several dimensions of politics. The workshop also sought to relate these legacies of violence to the region's economies of extraction. The region is confronted with social and political turmoil that receives little international attention. The combination of simmering and open instability and the relatively marginal position of the region vis-à-vis the wider continent risks propelling several countries into outright political strife with regional repercussions. The debates concluded that further thinking on how violence permeates every aspect of social and political life is much needed.

The placement of a Civil State Apparatus on structural position is a process which is very decisive in getting competent employees in their fields, because the exact placement in the proper positions will be able to help a the Agency in achieving the expected objectives. Placement is one of the important aspects in the human resources planning process, as it relates to efficiency and fairness. This research aims to find out how the placement of the Civil State Apparatus on structural position in the service of Social Government Talaud Islands. This research uses qualitative research methods. Based on the results of the study found that education, knowledge, skills, experience and age factor of a Civil State Apparatus became a benchmark in placing employees on structural position in the service of Social Government Talaud Islands. The Basic Social Service should be more effective and efficient in putting employees on structural position.Keywords: Placement, Structural Position, Civil State Apparatus.

This article examines the significance of citizenship with respect to disability. The article first highlights the idea of citizenship as social contract'. This means the possession of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights as well as the exercise of duties in society. Due to societal barriers, many disabled persons have difficulties fulfilling citizenship roles. Further, this article draws on citizenship theories; it examines three types of citizenship participation - the social citizen, the autonomous citizen and the political citizen - and discusses their promises and ableist implications. To counterbalance the exclusionary aspects of citizenship, we argue that human rights prove important. At the same time, human rights are more easily proclaimed than enforced and citizenship remains a precondition for effectively implementing human rights. The article concludes that citizenship is a relevant but also ambivalent concept when it comes to disability; it calls for a critical understanding of citizenship in Disability Studies.

Nature and technology are at the core of many ongoing social transformations and political struggles. While constructivist approaches in general and poststructuralist theories in particular point to the discursive negotiation of materiality, they have so far failed to adequately account for its constitutive role in stabilizing and destabilizing social relations. We argue that theories based on a "flat ontology" offer a way to re-materialize social theory while keeping the sensitivity to power-knowledge relations that poststructuralist theories have developed. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and recent discussions on Assemblage Theory in Human Geography, we sketch out a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the relations between symbolic and material entities in a non-deterministic way. Using the example of recent shifts in forest politics in Thailand under the influence of climate change policies, we discuss some of the empirical aspects that can be analyzed with the help of Assemblage Theory.

The ideal of an inclusive and participatory Internet has been undermined by the rise of misogynistic abuse on social media platforms. However, limited progress has been made at national – and to an extent European – levels in addressing this issue. In England and Wales, the tackling of underlying causes of online abuse has been overlooked because the law focuses on punishment rather than measures to prevent such abuses. Furthermore, online abuse has a significant impact on its victims that is underestimated by policymakers. This volume critically analyses the legal provisions that are currently deployed to tackle forms of online misogyny, and focuses on three aspects; firstly, the phenomenon of social media abuse; secondly, the poor and disparate legal responses to social media abuses; and thirdly, the similar failings of hate crime to tackle problems of online gender-based abuses. This book advances a compelling argument for legal changes to the existing hate crime, and communications legislation.

AbstractAlthough humans have coexisted with dogs and cats for thousands of years, that coexistence has taken on various meanings over time. Only recently have people openly included their pets as members of the family. Yet, because of the cultural ambivalence toward animals, what it means for a pet to "be" a family member remains unsettled. Drawing from research on family practices including kinship, household routines, childhood socialization, and domestic violence, this paper considers how pets participate in "doing" family and what their presence means for this social arrangement long considered quintessentially human. Today's more‐than‐human families represent a hybrid of relations, human and animal and social and natural, rather than an entirely new kind of family. Becoming family has always been contingent on a cast of nonhuman characters, and recognition of the "more‐than‐human" can enhance sociological understanding, not only of the family but also of other aspects of social life.

Abstract
The intergenerational learning within various types of social environment and in relation to different target groups has long covered a wide range of uses. The professional literature mostly describes its benefits for children and young people, however, the intergenerational education also contributes to the development of personality and the saturation of the educational and psycho-social needs of both adults and seniors. The paper represents the authors' output of the VEGA research project No. 1/0176/15 and it is structured into three chapters. In the first chapter, the author deals with the opportunities of the foreign language education for (not only) disabled seniors. The second chapter focuses on the intergenerational programmes that can be used in the language education of (not only) disabled seniors who are clients of social residential facilities. In the third chapter, the author elaborates the psychological aspects of the foreign language education of seniors.

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed 'sarcellite', after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors' residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.

In the last decade, Arctic energy research has been dominated by a focus on oil and gas exploration, development, and extraction. This is introductory article to an Energy Research & Social Science special issue, entitled "Arctic Energy: Views from the Social Sciences," challenges this approach and offers a broader and more inclusive perspective on Arctic energy research. In reflecting this perspective, some of the articles investigate social, economic, political, and environmental aspects of oil and gas development in the region while offering critiques of such development's processes and initiatives, both of which are usually seen in a positive light. Other articles target non-fossil sources and types of energy, thereby providing a view of the Arctic as a living laboratory for energy services. The special issue's broad and inclusive perspective is also represented by the diverse disciplinary, professional, and ethnic backgrounds of the contributing authors, as well as the range of conceptual and methodological approaches.

Suicide among athletes and military personnel diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was an international concern (Korngold, Farrell, & Fozdar, 2013; Wortzel, Shura, & Brenner, 2013; Kristof, 2012; Meterko, et al., 2012; Omalu, et al., 2011). Omalu (2013) and Tanner (2010) observed a correlation between brain injury and perceived social alienation resulting in injuries. It is suggested that, due to the unique social bonds created within each group, athletes and military personnel formed individual identities based on the dynamics of the group. Current psychotherapeutic approaches had limited effectiveness dealing with suicidal tendencies. Utilizing Seeman's (1959, 1967, 1971, 1975, and 1983) five alienation factors as redefined under a Christian Neo-Thomistic Personalist approach (Schmidt, 2011, 2012) could provide insight into why CTE-related suicide occurred and thereby initiate discussion regarding adjustments to social and cultural aspects of faith in treatment programs. KEYWORDS: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CTE, Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI, Alienation, Suicide, Thomistic Personalism, Christian Personalism

Abstract
This article approaches the social and cultural aspects of engaging with and communicating C. P. Cavafy and his oeuvre in Web 2.0 platforms from an interdisciplinary point of view. By discussing the social web as a new discourse network, the article initially describes how the data architecture of the Web 2.0 ecology reconfigures communicative procedures, relations and roles towards a platformed sociality. It subsequently focuses on ways in which the transformation of the reader/user into a content-producer may enrich the engagement with the Cavafian oeuvre. The notion of digi-formance is also proposed to describe the tropes that the usergenerated content is communicated through Web 2.0 environments, inaugurating a participatory culture and practice based on notions of consumer production, remix and sharing. The article ends by further suggesting how the social web and digital networking technologies could remodel literary sociality, in which the Cavafian oeuvre and scholarship are submerged, within the digital era.