Appalachian Englishes (AEs) have a long history of representation in linguistic literature, but until now no single work has examined the interplay of language production and perception with an eye toward the role that language plays in the construction of personal and social identities.
Abstract In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minority representation acts as a reputational shield to prevent allegations of intolerance. Looking at parliaments of eight European countries between 1990 and 2015, we find that parties that shifted to the right in response to a public mood swing to the right are indeed significantly more likely to bring more ethnic minority politicians into parliament. This has important implications for the literature on descriptive representation and party platform change.
While Ibsen's plays were seldom performed in Romania in the first half of the 20th century, historical sources highlight his strong impact on the national theatre practice. To address this contradiction, Gianina Druta approaches the reception of Ibsen in the Romanian theatre in the period 1894-1947, combining Digital Humanities and theatre historiography. This investigation of the European theatre culture and the way in which the foreign acting and staging traditions influenced the Romanian Ibsenites provides new insights into mechanisms of aesthetic transmission. Thus, this study presents a European theatre landscape whose unpredictability and uniqueness cannot be confined to essentialist interpretations.
Through the histories of English trading companies -- the Levant Company, the East India Company, and the Royal African Company -- this book shows how non-European peoples in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Western India used their control over these companies to shape the emergence of English freedom.
In: African journal of political science: a journal of the African Association of Political Science = Revue africaine de science politique, Band 11, Heft 2, S. 38-50
This article uses the concept 'Bricoleurs' to analyse the different categories of indigenous small- scale miners in Zimbabwe. Indigenous citizens constitute the bulk of the small and medium scale gold miners who continue to use antiquated methods of extraction and processing and they market their gold through illegal networks managed by middlemen. The study highlights the challenges Bricoleurs encounter in forcing inclusion into the mainstream mining economy, and the government's failure to capture them into the formal gold market. The indigenous gold miners' experiences reveal the trials posed by fragmented and incoherent legal and institutional policy frameworks that militate against the Bricoleur miners' productivity. With gold deposits found all over the country, and in the absence of supporting organisational structures, the Bricoleurs' self-empowerment through devious means has become accepted by mining authorities. Data for this article was collected mostly through interviews with different stakeholders in the gold mining industry in Harare, Shurugwi and Chakari in Zimbabwe.
Citizens with lower social status are underrepresented in participatory democratic innovations like citizens' initiatives. Much research focuses on the barriers to participation that these citizens experience. The current study concentrates on civil servants tasked with advising on what initiatives to support and how. Informed by research on the social construction of target groups and the use of social stereotypes by civil servants, our work scrutinizes how the social status of initiators plays a role in the assessments of citizens' initiatives. Grounded on vignette-based, in-depth interviews with civil servants, we conclude that social status does indeed play a role. Contrary to the conventional understanding, we find that: (1) high-status initiators are met with suspicion and low-status initiators with benevolence; and (2) high-status initiators are offered hands-off support, while those with a low status are provided with hands-on help to carry out their plans.
AbstractModern English policing arose from crime, laws, and demands for social order, but this perspective further introduces matters of philosophy that ties political liberty to political economy as being less recognized but equally powerful contributors. Shown here is how civic republican political economy (1600–1750) policing lost favor to laissez-faire utilitarian preferences (1750–1829) and helped produce more civic democratic policing. Through this perspective, it shows that Sir Robert Peel's 1829 police were really centuries in the making.
Recording and transcribing interviews in qualitative social research is a vital but time-consuming and resource-intensive task. To tackle this challenge, researchers have explored various alternative approaches; automatic transcription utilising speech recognition algorithms has emerged as a promising solution. The question of whether automated transcripts can match the quality of transcripts produced by humans remains unanswered. In this paper we systematically compare multiple automatic transcription tools: Amberscript, Dragon, F4x, Happy Scribe, NVivo, Sonix, Trint, Otter, and Whisper. We evaluate aspects of data protection, accuracy, time efficiency, and costs for an English and a German interview. Based on the analysis, we conclude that Whisper performs best overall and that similar local-automatic transcription tools are likely to become more relevant. For any type of transcription, we recommend reviewing the text to ensure accuracy. We hope to shed light on the effectiveness of automatic transcription services and provide a comparative frame for others interested in automatic transcription.
Sources of English Legal History: Public Law to 1750 is the definitive source book on the foundations of English public law. An extensive collection of illustrative original materials, it is a companion book to Baker and Milsom Sources of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750, 2e (OUP, 2010).