Suchergebnisse

'Writing is a process; the act of transforming thoughts into print requires a non-linear sequence of stages or creative acts' (James B. Gray, cited by Cassany, 1993). I would add that it is also the act of transforming experience. This article describes my own personal process of transformation in the experience and understanding of vulnerable employment - a slow, open, recursive and difficult process. The first, academic, section flows easily. Then things get harder. The auto-ethnography was the most challenging part. Firstly because it was a matter of personal reflection; then because of a having to strip naked, as it were. Finding a reasonably elegant and flexible way to link the two sections was demanding, and one of the objectives of the exercise was to reach a satisfactorily readable end result.

This work raises the study of creativity and creative processes as a relevant field for the sociological Social Psychology. In this way, the main goal of this work is to consider the creativity and the creative process as social processes. Considering therefore the need to analyse them in the social-cultural-historical context in which they occur, thus opening a new scenario to think about creativity and the creative process in the present time. In this new scenario, the dominant forms of knowledge circulation based on an individualizing 'ontology of creative works' are no longer unique. And their pertinence and legitimacy can be re-raised in the present time. In this way, this work also argues that different forms of knowledge circulation mean different socio-political implications. Thus, to specify and to consider them as a choice in terms of knowledge production, allows us to problematize them from the standpoint of creator/ producer and from the creative process' standpoint.

Having consolidated his power in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin long focused on internal affairs: the Five Year Plans, collectivization of agriculture, rapid industrialization, and modernization of the Red Army. Despite his penchant for domestic policy, from the summer of 1936 Stalin's Soviet Union was increasingly drawn into foreign affairs. This article explores Stalin's foreign policy on the eve of the Second World War. The Soviet Union's multiple failures in forging an anti-Fascist alliance with Britain and France, most notably in the Spanish Civil War, will be explored as the prelude to Stalin's eventual decision, in August 1939, to authorize the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.