Suchergebnisse

"The intent of the present monograph is to lay down the theoretical foundations for studying the topology of compact urban patterns, using methods from spectral graph theory and statistical physics. These methods are demonstrated as tools to investigate the structure of a number of real cities with widely differing properties: medieval Cierman cities, the webs of city canals in Amster dam and Venice; and a modern urban structure such as found in Manhattan." "Last but not least, the book concludes by providing a brief overview of possible applications that will eventually lead to a useful body of knowledge for architects, urban planners and civil engineers."--BOOK JACKET

Several areas of political research deal with sequences, that is, successions of standard categorical states or events: political sociology, evolution of regimes, analysis of speeches, geopolitics, comparative studies, or elections. At least three kinds of longitudinal methods, popular in political science, may attempt at treating political longitudinal objects: regression models, event history analysis and time series analysis. Yet, none can unfold the three dimensions of categorical time series, that is, the nature of the states/events composing the sequences, their order and length. Sequence analysis, with the optimal matching algorithm as a core tool, was specifically designed to this task. It is now commonly used in sociology and demography, and more and more in geography and history. This pragmatic, state-by-state comparison of sequences does not make any assumption about an underlying process that would generate sequences. The paper first defines sequences and their empirical applications. Then it details the principles of sequence analysis and its canonical steps. It shows how sequence analysis connects to and/or competes with other multivariate methods, before giving an overview of advanced issues and available software. To illustrate how fruitful this approach can be for political science, I apply it to a retrospective survey conducted among members of the main French activist organization mobilizing against AIDS.

Dans le sillage du succès de La Haine (1995) de Mathieu Kassovitz, plusieurs films dramatiques français ont pris la banlieue pour décor et pour sujet. Puis, à partir de la fin des années 1990, les grands ensembles ont servi de point d'ancrage à plusieurs comédies légères décrivant un espace social pluriethnique et sympathique. En reprenant avec humour des thématiques généralement traitées avec gravité (comme la petite délinquance ou la violence verbale), ces comédies de banlieue sont venues composer un sous-genre du cinéma hexagonal. Les nombreuses implantations de multiplexes périurbains conjuguées à la popularité du symbole black-blanc-beur ont favorisé la production de fictions aux sujets « décentrés ». Au fil des sorties, les personnages représentant l'immigration maghrébine (notamment les figures de l'»Arabe», du « Maghrébin» ou du « Beur») sont devenus centraux dans la plupart des comédies de banlieue dont l'humour s'est progressivement ethnicisé. Dans ce texte, nous questionnons les dimensions créatives, économiques et politiques de ces évolutions.

Prior the middle of the 90', interviewing participants in protest events was quiet rare. INdividual SUrveys in RAllies (INSURA) did enter the social researcher's usual toolkit only in the following decade after Favre, Fillieule and Mayer (1997) conducted such a survey with as a primary ambition to build a solid methodological framework that could be subsequently applied by other researchers. After some years of intensive use of INSURA, one is entitled to wonder whether that technique has fulfilled social researchers' hopes or not. In that paper, results of a collective work on alter-global rallies in Evian and Saint- Denis are used to answer three interrelated questions. Firstly, some basic methodological questions about how to collect data on crowds are adressed. What are the specific constraints of interviewing people at the very moment they are "expressing" a political opinion? What specific constraints result from the morphology of the covered events, that is to say, how to build a valid sampling frame? The authors then turn to a more general point about the questions that can be solved, or not, using that technique. Secondly it is the strenghts and weaknesses of INSURA in exploring the transnational dimension of alter global protests that is adressed. The authors show that INSURA is certainly well suited to explore the demographics of alter-global events, as well as relational networks of individuals and multiple belongings. On the contrary, it is assumed that organization networks and movement's boundaries are far more difficult to explore through that method, a fact that seriously limits international cross comparisons of events and movements based on that tool.

Scholarship at the intersection of migration studies and international relations has been increasingly interested in diasporas in world politics, yet analysis integrating relevant literature in systematic ways through rigorous empirical methods has been largely missing. How can mixed-methods techniques contribute to the evolution of a relatively new research program, such as the study of diaspora mobilizations in conflict processes? How can these techniques identify data patterns that could help establish meaningful analytical categories and factor in multi-sited complexity? Based on a large-scale European Research Council migration project "Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty," this Research Note offers a pathway for future scholarship on how to systematically do so. It presents a rich theoretically informed coding procedure that systematizes the analysis of four researchers working across conflict-generated diasporas in multiple host-countries and linked to conflicts in multiple countries of origin. Correspondence and cluster analyses are used to isolate profiles of diaspora entrepreneurs. Procedures used early in the project's life-cycle helped later to design a unique survey and inform a deeper comparative causal analysis, thus creating a coherent conversation among different research products.