Suchergebnisse

Die Autorin untersucht in ihrer biographischen Studie die Entwicklung einer neuen Beziehungskultur zwischen Mutter und Tochter, die eine Folge der transnationalen Migrationsprozesse ist und die traditionelle Rollenverteilung zwischen zwei Frauengenerationen ablöst. Sie verdeutlicht dies am Beispiel einer türkischen Mutter, die im Heimatland aufgewachsen ist und als "Kulturvermittlerin" traditioneller Wertvorstellungen dient, und ihrer Tochter, die in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland geboren ist. Sie berichtet in diesem Zusammenhang auch über einige Ergebnisse ihres Forschungsprojekts, in welchem sie den Wandel intergenerationeller Prozesse im Kontext von Migration, die Identitätsbildung in Minderheits- und Mehrheitsgesellschaften sowie genderspezifische Aspekte der Kulturübertragung untersuchte. Sie beschreibt im vorliegenden Beitrag sowohl die Vermittlung von Kultur und Tradition von Mutter zu Tochter, als auch die Übertragung von neuen Erfahrungen der Tochter, die diese in den Institutionen von Schule und Moschee in Deutschland gesammelt hat, an die Mutter. (ICI).

This study of the education system of Macedonia is part of the handbook "The education systems of Europe" which presents an analytical description of the education systems of all European countries, following common guidelines. The study begins with the historical and socio-cultural background of the Macedonian educational system which is followed by the description of the organizational and administrative context of the current education system. The next step is the functioning of the current education system, beginning with a structural overview and followed by an analysis of the different levels of the education system, including, as a separate chapter, post-secondary and tertiary education. The country study ends with an analysis of discussions and perspectives for further development. A diagram illustrating the structural scheme of the Macedonian educational system is part of this article. (DIPF/Orig./Kie.).

"Language is a central element of any culture and society. For each
human, it is the main instrument for perceiving and evaluating
the world around himself or herself. Language is, therefore, a
central element of identity: identity implies the perception of one's own
strengths and weaknesses, the evaluation of one's own past, the visions
of one's own future. Identity provides aims, direction and consistency to
the actions of men or women. This self-image or identity is developed
through interaction with other people; one's self-image, at least to some
degree, must be shared and validated by others. Language plays a central
role. To speak a common language per se creates a feeling of communality
(Sapir 1951: 157; Whorf 1956; Weber 1964: 305ff.; Goebl et
al. 1996). Adequate mastery of a language is a decisive determinant of a
satisfactory communication with other people, and also for social recognition,
self-confidence and the feeling of security in the world. Linguistic
problems, from stuttering to dumbness, probably entail the strongest
harm to one's self-image and self-consciousness.
In the first part of this essay, I will elaborate the relationship between
language and identity and propose a central thesis. Subsequently, I
describe five typical, different social constellations in which a change of
language can occur. Here, I will present examples from different linguistic
areas of the world. Finally, I will present some considerations about the
role of language education and politics today." (excerpt)

"With the ratification of the Reform Treaty, the European Union will be
based on two complementary principles: the principle of representative
democracy and the principle of participatory democracy. Even though the
two respective sub-headings in the draft Constitutional Treaty (Article I, 46
and Article I, 47) have been omitted, the Intergovernmental Conference did
not introduce any change in substance. Article 11 of the Reform Treaty
pledges to give citizens and representative associations a voice 'in all areas of
Union action', and to 'maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue
with representative associations and civil society', and it demands that the
Commission 'carry out broad consultations with parties concerned in order
to ensure that the Union's actions are coherent and transparent'. With Clause
4, it now also endows citizens with the right to initiate an action. However,
first, that action is of one type only, i.e., 'where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties'.
Second, that action is valid only when 'not less than one million citizens
who are nationals of a significant number of Member States' engage in it.
Third, and most importantly, that action is only an invitation to the
Commission, one which the Commission is not obliged to accept." (excerpt)

"On 25th-27th October 2007, after more than three years of CONNEX ('Connecting Excellence on European Governance'), Research Group 4, working on 'Civil society and interest representation in EU-Governance' and Research Group 5, working on 'Social capital as catalyst of civic engagement and quality of governance' met in Piran, Slovenia for a Wrapping-up Conference (WUC). The main aim of the conference was to bring together the state of the art knowledge of both Research Groups. The idea was to present new insights gained during CONNEX, to deduct new research questions for the last months of CONNEX, as well as for continued research after CONNEX, thus assuring sustainability. The conference focused on three aspects of civil society and European governance and a number of cross-cutting questions were discussed related to biased representation (Session I), participatory engineering (Session II) and civil society and democracy in the EU (Session III)." (excerpt)

With the advent of mobile devices, mediatized political discourse became more dynamic. I assume that the microblog Twitter can be considered as a medium for spatial coordination during protests. Therefore, the case of neo-Nazi demonstrations and counter-protests in the city of Dresden that occurred in February 2012 is analysed. Data consists of microposts that occurred during the event. Quantitative analysis of hashtag and retweet frequencies was performed as well as qualitative speech act pattern analysis and a tempo-spatial discourse analysis on selected subsets of microposts. Results show that a common linguistic practice is verbal georeferencing and by that constructing space. Empirical analysis indicates a strong relation between communicational online space and physical offline place: Protest participants permanently reconfigure spatial context discursively and thus the contested protest area becomes a temporarily meaningful place.

The aim of this article is to find in the pages of the national magazine Revista 22, reflections of the minority issue - in this case the targeted subject being the condition of Jewish minority of Romania in the country or emigrated abroad (as for instance Israel). The article brings into discussion also reflections of Jews in Europe. The method of work is the critical interpretations of articles combined with a descriptive analysis of their content. Our conclusion leads to the fact that there is a small, active community of Jews in Romania represented at the political level as a minority community, pursuing specific interests who cherishes the memory of Holocaust and wants to say the truth about it, having important ties and connections with the Romanian Jews from Israel and being directly interested in maintaining Jewish interests in Israel. At European level, the problems, existing with the inner states minorities, are amplified by waves of migrations coming from Asia. The conclusion is that the Revista 22 brings a lot of information about the Jewish minority from Romania, resolving the historical issue of saying the truth about the Holocaust, but, as a recommendation, I suggest to bring more fresh news and periodically about Israel, as a vivid center of religions, that concerns European Union and its citizens.

Parties adopt online participation methods in the hope of engaging a wider group of participants. However, literature on the digital divide suggests that this is unlikely to happen, as online participa-tion remains dependent on the same factors as offline participation: income, class, education. Based on a mixed methods study of members of the Green Party Germany, this paper discusses the expected and actual effects of online participation tools on the participation of party members. Expectations are that these tools will benefit nearly everyone, but in practice, the goal to engage inactive members is only partially achieved: Younger members and those with lower educational attainments are mo-bilised, but women are not. These effect differ depending on the type of technology. I argue that this is an expression of the prevailing digital divide, which needs to consider not only a socio-demo-graphic divisions, but also the multifaceted effects of different technologies.

"Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational practices of political parties. Following a deductive approach, we devise a number of quantitative measures from a discussion of theoretical constructs in sociological theory. The resulting measures make different - mostly qualitative - aspects of online conversational practices amenable to computation. We evaluate our computational approach by applying it in a case study. In particular, we study online conversational practices of German politicians on Twitter during the German federal election 2013. We find that political parties share some interesting patterns of behavior, but also exhibit some unique and interesting idiosyncrasies. Our work sheds light on (i) how complex cultural phenomena such as online conversational practices are amenable to quantification and (ii) the way social media such as Twitter are utilized by political parties." (author's abstract)