Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and (...) guided by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 1. A year has passed and continent. has sedimented an annual strata into the geological record of the Internet. During the winter months we gratefully received donations from our readership and we've applied these funds to offset some of the costs of maintaining our tidy corner of the Web. Specifically, we've used these funds to renew our accounts at Flickr, Soundcloud, and Vimeo. We also bought a snippet of code. We continue to accept donations at our WePay (...) account so that we can upgrade our server space, which is currently being donated to us. For this, our fifth issue, we offer varve as our constellating theme. From the Swedish varv , whose semantic web includes notions of “revolution,” accretion “in layers,” and “circle,” a varve is that precise geologic formation referring to the whole of any annual sedimentary layer. We didn't need to rely on Einstein alone to relativize space and time; all of the build-up of matter accrued by the passage had already accomplished that—the spatialization of time. Scaling the term up, we recall ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene to refer to the extent to which human impact upon the Earth had come to constitute a new geological era. Today the time we take for reflection plumbs an unprecedented ecology and brings to consciousness undiscovered contingencies. As material and medium for making, remaking, archeologizing, and archiving thought, varves (and/as/or journals) are species of the broader category of rhythmites . Secret-ing the rhythms of deep time, every record, geologic or otherwise, is subject to all the effects of interpretation and rhetoric that the contemporary DJ has at their disposal—reverberated, delayed, stuttered, syncopated, beat-juggled, back-spun, cross-faded from one epoch to another. The record itself, however, is hyperspecific: referring to moments of passing contexts, communities, and histories. But as such, a record constitutes the possibility of a long view, chronicling changes in climates, movements of occupation, and the long counts of calendars. As always, continent. welcomes excavations transdisciplinary and media-agnostic in nature and scope. We look forward to accepting yours through May 15. (shrink)

Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the design space.

In this work, the peculiarities of the communicative space in the novel of modern German writer Bernard Shlink ‘The Homecoming‘ are considered. These peculiarities include literary, historical and sociological context and intertextual sub-bases of the novel containing sense bearing matters relevant for all times and nationalities; dialogic relations, expressed in the strategy of communication of characters of the novel. It is proved that the communicative space is not limited in the novel by antiquity, but rather includes (...) token for German mentality works, motifs and images. The famous Faust’s dilemma is being played up in the novel. Revealing in the mythological images models of main psychological types and conflicts connected with the type of the personality, B. Shlink creates in his novel a number of Odysseuses, Penelopes and Telemaches. The Odysseus model manifests itself primarily in two main characters of the novel: Peter and Johann Debauers. However, the father personifies only destructive and immoral, which finally leads to his moral inability, the Odysseus-junior - Peter, who played Telemachus in the beginning of the novel, finds in his wanderings solid moral values. Perceiving the myth as a historical and dialectic process, B. Shlink, like Th. Mann, takes it as a peculiar cipher of the human experience, a model of development of the humanistic values, a prototype of mutual battle between progress and regress, which b. Shlink masterfully describes in a communicative space of his novel. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

In this article, we argue how instant messaging (IM) is actively made into a communicative space of their own among migrant girls. Triangulating data gathered through large-scale surveys, interviews and textual analysis of IM transcripts, we focus on Moroccan-Dutch girls who use instant messaging as a space where they can negotiate several issues at the crossroads of national, ethnic, racial, age and linguistic specificities. We take an intersectional perspective to disentangle how they perform differential selves using IM (...) both as an ‘onstage’ activity through which they express their communal, public and global youth cultural belongings and as a ‘backstage’ activity through which they articulate their individual, private and intimate identity expression. Instant messaging appears to be a space where they can strategically (re-)position themselves. The relationship between the online world of IM and the off-line world is shown to be intricate and complex; at certain points, both worlds overlap and at others they diverge. Despite all existing constraints that are both related to gender restrictions, often disenfranchised family backgrounds, religious dictums, and surveillance by parents, siblings and peers, which affect Moroccan-Dutch girls in specific ways, IM is also understood as a unique space for exerting their agency in autonomous, playful and intimate ways. (shrink)

This book is the result of intensive and continued discussions about the social role of language and its conceptualisations in societies other than Northern (European-American) ones. Language as a means of expressing as well as evoking both interiority and community has been in the focus of these discussions, led among linguists, anthropologists, and Egyptologists, and leading to a collection of essays that provide studies that transcend previously considered approaches. Its contributions are in particular interested in understanding how the attitude of (...) the individual towards societal processes and strategies of norming is negotiated emotionally, and how individual interests and attitudes can be articulated. Discourses on public spaces are in the focus, in order to analyse those strategies that are employed to articulate dissent (for example, in the sense of face-threatening acts). This raises a number of questions on the spatial and public situatedness of emotions and language: How is the public space dealt with and reflected in language as property, heritage, and as a part of ascribed identities? Which role do emotions play in this space? How is emotion employed there as part of place making in relation to identity constructions? What is the connection between emotion, performance and emblematic spaces and places? Which opportunities of the violation of norms and transgression do such public spaces offer to actors and speakers? These questions intend to address the communicative representation of core cultural processes and concepts. (shrink)

The fall of the Communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and their commitment to social, political and economic reform, represent two aspects of a deep process of social transformation. As in all socio-political transformation which overturns the previous political and economic order, this process needed to develop an ideology and a concrete image of the future in order to mobilize their populations, to invent that certain political rationality which is indispensable for bringing reform to (...) a successful conclusion, and to produce a certain coherence in the changes which occurred in the various fields of life in society. Unlike the preceding revolutions which had gradually nourished hopes for a better life and had expanded the horizons of human possibility with difficulty, movements towards democracy in the former Communist countries found an almost ready-made model. (shrink)

Facial information is a powerful channel for human-to-human communication. Characteristically, faces can be defined as biological objects that are four-dimensional (4D) patterns, whereby they have concurrently a spatial structure as well as temporal dynamics. The spatial characteristics of facial objects possess three dimensions (3D), namely breadth, height and importantly, depth. The temporal properties of facial objects are defined by how a 3D facial structure evolves dynamically over time; where time is referred to as the fourth dimension (4D). Our entire perspective (...) of another’s face, whether it be social, affective or cognitive perceptions, is therefore built on a combination of 3D and 4D visual cues. Counterintuitively, over the past few decades of experimental research in psychology, facial stimuli have largely been presented to participants as a spatial pattern that has been flattened into two dimensions (2D), while remaining largely static. The following review aims to advance and update facial researchers, on the recent revolution in computer-generated, realistic 4D facial models produced from real-life human subjects. We delve in-depth to summarize recent studies which have utilized facial stimuli that possess 3D structural cues (geometry and depth) and 4D temporal cues (3D structure + dynamic viewpoint and movement). In sum, we have found that higher-order perceptions such as identity, gender, ethnicity, emotion and personality, are critically influenced by the 4D characteristics embedded within natural human faces. In future, it is recommended that facial stimuli incorporate the 4D space-time perspective with the proposed time-resolved methods. (shrink)

This paper offers a brand storytelling, that is a narratological account of Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media story-world is identified with a process of narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The narrative model that is put forward aims at outlining the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and structural components (actors, settings, actions, relationships). A series of deep or ontological (...) metaphors are singled out as the core DNA of this place brand, by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropical articulation of Covid-19’s narrative. The virus’ kernel is identified with terror, as a menacing force that wipes out existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins and operational mode. In this context, familiar urban spaces, cultural practices and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed and reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by approaching a globally relevant sociocultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective. (shrink)

Within the framework of 'Temporalities and the Urban Fabric: Co-Producing Liminal Spaces in Transitional Epochs,' this rigorous examination unravels the multilayered nuances of temporality and its intimate relationship with urban spaces in times of transition. The research delineates the intricate interplay between public exhibitions, urban realms, and socio-political paradigms, particularly within the dynamic settings of the metropolitan entities of Houston and Amsterdam. These cities, as epitomes of temporal urban flux, become fertile grounds for exploring the ephemeral essence of liminal spaces (...) and their transformative manifestations. By weaving together diverse academic domains – from Design Computation and Fabrication to Urban Communities and Spatial Justice – this study underscores the symbiotic fusion of Augmented Reality (AR) and Gamification within the broader canvas of urban temporalities. Crucially, the research accentuates the transformative potential of Extended Reality (XR) in augmenting the theoretical and methodological contours of urban studies within these transitional epochs. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 475-480.

Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI which structure science and society relationships is crucial if we are to properly replace the (...) VFI with a better ideal. (shrink)

The problem of identity and identity of the individual, which exists throughout human history, is particularly acute at the intersection of epochs, when existing knowledge and skills are not enough to understand the processes taking place in society, history, and nature, and new theories and tools have not yet been developed. When a civilization was faced with a paradox, when it was decided whether to live as before or accept a new one, it was individuals who were able to go (...) beyond identity that showed a new path. It went against the existing dogmas, against identity. Moreover, over time, man had to accept many more rules and restrictions than at the beginning of his existence. At the intersection of epochs, there was an infusion of new ideas into society. This was done by people who did not just see the future in dreams or nightmares, but were able to imagine what the implementation of a particular postulate in the life of society entails. There was a crisis that literally buried all the old ideas about the world around us and other communities. It was then that the metaphysical perception of the world took on a real form, which, nevertheless, had to be worked out for the sake of the existence of society as a whole. (shrink)

Russian abstract: В данном сборнике статей раскрывается формирование структурно-онтологического представления о таком явлении, как городское пространство. Наряду с соответствующей концептуализацией, также представлено и объяснено определение городского сообщества. Обоснована логика классификации городских сообществ. А также проанализированы факторы, обуславливающие их устойчивость. -/- English abstract: This collection of articles reveals the formation of a structural-ontological concept of such a phenomenon as urban space. Along with relevant conceptualization, the definition of an urban community is also presented and explained. The logic of classification of (...) urban communities is substantiated. And also analyzed the factors that determine their stability. (shrink)

Trust is vital for individuals to flourish and have a sense of well-being in their community. A trusting society allows people to feel safe, communicate with each other and engage with those who are different to themselves without feeling fearful. In this paper I employ an Aristotelian framework in order to identify trust as a virtue and I defend the need to cultivate trust in children. I discuss the case study of Buranda State School in Queensland, Australia as an instance (...) of successful school reform that reinstates trust in an educational setting. Buranda makes use of the community of inquiry (CoI) pedagogy practiced by advocates of philosophy for children (P4C). Educators may create a safe space in the classroom by using the CoI and giving children the chance to voice their ideas and build upon, as well as question, those of others in a democratic and respectful manner. Through this pragmatic dialogue, trust may be established, along with a sense of belonging that supports well-being in the classroom as well as in life. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of the research is to define certain interaction features between a human and the urban environment in the global world. Theoretical basis. The study in based on the investigations of contemporary researchers in social philosophy and urban science, as well as social scientists of Chicago School. Originality. The originality of the research is to analyze the "human-urban space" system in terms of the influence of local space of the global world on the human identity formation (...) and preservation. Conclusions. Modern information technologies have significantly contributed into changes in the culture, society, individual consciousness and perception. They have given them absolutely global character and reorganized the value and standard system of the individual. As a result, it caused the identity crisis, so typical of the postindustrial society. Thus, one of the possible ways to overcome the crisis is to harmonize the interaction in the "human-urban space" system as an area of individual space of human social and cultural identity. (shrink)

Urban cities in the sub-Saharan Africa have witnessed unprecedented transformation because of the proliferation of religious orders within the social landscape. From Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon to Uganda, religious practitioners are actively involved in the spatial transformation through the construction of sacred spaces or prayer camps. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) typifies one of the several examples of African Pentecostal denominations with transnational status in 200 countries across the world with the hub of its international office situated at (...) the Redemption Camp, Mowe, Nigeria. The sacralisation of forest areas spanning 1600 ha of land has redefined religious institutions such as RCCG as perhaps one of the largest owners of private estate in Nigeria. However, there seems to be an intentional replication of the Redemption Camp, Mowe across Nigeria as well as across the Atlantic as part of the RCCG missionary enterprise. This study aims to utilise the ethnography of the Redemption Camps in Nigeria and Floyd, Texas, United States. The theoretical framework of social worlds is employed to examine the dynamics of religious creativity, innovations, contextual challenges of place-making involved in creating Redemption Camps across borders by the leadership of RCCG through the appropriation of religious capital of its community of sentiments. (shrink)

Legal concepts and notions are deeply affected by religions, ethics, philosophy and the culture of a particular nation. As Friedman Comparing legal cultures, Dartmouth, Aldershot, 1997, p. 34) highlights, understanding legal culture is a crucial factor as it both affects their translation and interpretation and consequently has an impact on the application of law. This increases in importance, for example, in the context of the principle of mutual trust and recognition of judgments assumed by the European Union as the cornerstone (...) of judicial co-operation in the European Union, which would not be possible without the trust in each other’s justice system and the respect for the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States. In that vein, ‘the Third Space’, where legal concepts and notions of multiple origins meet and where their meanings are negotiated, transformed, translated and integrated into various socio-political and cultural contexts has acquired an immense significance. Although there may be natural similarities between legal professions in the European Union, they could differ quite substantially as they are deeply rooted in the history and societal evolution of a country; therefore, they are generally regulated at a national, not a European level. In light of the above, the author intends to perform an in-depth analysis of key terminology in the field of names of legal professions which exist in the Member States of the European Union. The author focuses on the terms which refer to the legal profession of lawyers as they might pose obstacles in translation and interpretation due to different functions and roles these legal professionals play in their legal systems or due to the lack of their equivalents in other legal systems. The terminology is compared to present similarities and differences in their meaning, particularly putting some emphasis on socio-political and cultural contexts. The research methods encompass the analysis of relevant literature and the terminological analysis of the research material, which includes the information on legal professions provided by particular Member States on the European e-Justice portal and relevant national regulations in that respect. Finally, the author draws the conclusion that a thorough analysis of the functions and roles of a particular legal profession in socio-political and cultural contexts is required before the translation and interpretation of the term is provided as it helps to avoid ambiguity and makes legal communication precise. (shrink)

This article argues that sights of objects in the world and its representations makes time disappear into space. Space as the oblivion of time. The main purpose of the article is to show the dialectic of memory and forgetting within individual consciousness. Forgetting is not the loss of memory but an essential component of memory itself. Forgetfulness, like memory, embodies also its temporality: the three temporal figures of forgetting are the return, the abeyance and the recommencement. Among the (...) diseases of memory we distinguish partial and global amnesias, and hypermnesias. The phenomenon of ‘illusion of memory’ or ‘false memory’ shows the insufficiency of the naturalistic or cognitivistic theory of memory. In this respect we have to evaluate the theory of forgetting as the effacement of traces. The paper defends rather a pragmatic approach by studying the ‘exercise of memory’ in all its forms, especially blocked memory, manipulated memory and commanded memory. (shrink)

Most, if not all, philosophers agree that computers cannot learn what words refers to from raw text alone. While many attacked Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, no one seemed to question this most basic assumption. For how can computers learn something that is not in the data? Emily Bender and Alexander Koller ( 2020 ) recently presented a related thought experiment—the so-called Octopus thought experiment, which replaces the rule-based interlocutor of Searle’s thought experiment with a neural language model. The Octopus (...) thought experiment was awarded a best paper prize and was widely debated in the AI community. Again, however, even its fiercest opponents accepted the premise that what a word refers to cannot be induced in the absence of direct supervision. I will argue that what a word refers to _is_ probably learnable from raw text alone. Here’s why: higher-order concept co-occurrence statistics are stable across languages and across modalities, because language use (universally) reflects the world we live in (which is relatively stable). Such statistics are sufficient to establish what words refer to. My conjecture is supported by a literature survey, a thought experiment, and an actual experiment. (shrink)

The book offers a new treatment of the capacity to perceive, act on, and know about the world together with others. I argue that creatures capable of joint attention stand in a unique perceptual and epistemic relation to their surroundings: they operate in an environment that they, through their communication with their fellow perceivers, help constitute. I show that this relation can be marshaled to address a range of questions about the social aspect of the mind and its perceptual and (...) cognitive capacities. I begin with a conceptual question about a complex kind of sociocognitive phenomenon—perceptual common knowledge—and develop an empirically informed account of the spatial structure of the environment in and about which such knowledge is possible. In the course of his argument, I address such topics as demonstrative reference in communication, common knowledge about jointly perceived objects, and spatial awareness in joint perception and action. (shrink)

PurposeMāori culture is a central aspect inAotearoa/New Zealand's national identity. Beginning in the 1970s biculturalism saw the indigenous culture and values acknowledged and incorporated in wider public discourse and policy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether New Zealand's cyberspace accommodates Māori. It explores how the web space is influenced by biculturalism and in turn what an understanding of this web space can tell us about biculturalism inAotearoa.Design/methodology/approachA brief introduction to biculturalism in New Zealand provides the (...) background to the investigation of the country's web space. Recent access statistics enquire whether Māori are actually connected to the internet. The exploration of the structure of the internet is informed by newspaper articles and online documents relating to the development of two Māori specific second‐level domain name spaces. A word‐frequency analysis within a sample of 21 websites provides an overview into the use of the Māori language in cyberspace.FindingsThe paper shows that although Māori have the lowest access rate to the internet compared to other ethnic groups in New Zealand, their influence on the country's web space is nonetheless far‐reaching. Developments regarding Māori language uses over the last years are generally progressive. Māori culture and ongoing social changes are increasingly accommodated on the internet – Māori have been actively shaping the web space. However, these efforts do require the support and acceptance of the wider Internet community. The linguistic and structural developments taking place online since the mid 1990s were influenced by the bicultural thinking, public discourse and practice of the time.Originality/valueThis paper draws together the Māori success‐stories in their endeavour to assert their cultural needs in New Zealand's cyberspace. It highlights that the understanding ofAotearoaas being a bicultural country influenced developments taking place online potentially will lead to a truly bicultural web space in the near future. (shrink)

The article discusses the key stages of the development of ‘disability studies’. Public awareness of the problems of inclusion, as overcoming social inequality, is in the stage of formation in Ukraine and needs a socio-philosophical implementation. he main purpose of the article is to analyze the problem of social space of the city, which is convenient for the life of citizens with different set of opportunities, and the expediency of including disability as a social phenomenon in the broad philosophical (...) context of study. The field of thinking about the city in the study is outlined in the following concepts: the right to the city, the urban space for human development, social communications and the just principles of being. It is important to understand the vector of the development of the socio-cultural field of the city in terms of overcoming the "soulless indifference" (bliss) and for the development of communication between the citizens. The novelty of the work is determined by the rationale for the transformation of traditional disability models in modern conditions of social development. The relevance of the study is associated with the complexity of the phenomenon of disability, insufficient knowledge of the factors and problems of inclusion of people with special needs in society. With the growing number of people with disabilities in society, the problem of developing a culture of disability becomes urgent, the low level of which should be considered a challenge. A culture of disability implies a mutual desire of people with disabilities and society to move towards each other. The practical aspect of the research is related to the need for change of social consciousness, inclusion of persons with disabilities in the social space, development of social competences of people with disabilities and transformation of these people from the object of social assistance into an active subject and participant of the processes taking place in society., implementation of projects based on justice and citizenship. (shrink)

Communication in law provides a space for alternatives, a Third Space, wherein boundaries between various systems are strongly anchored to a country’s language, history and societal development. Transfers, modifications, and integrations of such systems into other target languages may result in many effects of distortions and appropriations, reformulations and renewals as well as of misinterpretations in communication. Hence, Third Space is a necessary prerequisite for negotiation, transformation and translation from culture A to culture B, since it operates (...) as a multi-stage dynamic where such mechanisms should be analyzed in a fair and equitable manner. (shrink)

The specificity of misinformation about Covid-19 which was outspread in the media landscape of Ukrainian society was demonstrated in the article. The authors relying on the basics of postmodern theory within interdisciplinary discourse trace the means of forming misinformation and its influence on changing worldview landmarks of humanity. The authors underline that information in the postmodern conception of Jean Baudrillard is also capable to destroy its own content, communication and social ground. Misinformation about Covid-19 is «a stage setting of communication» (...) since it only creates insight into sense and is outspreaded with different channels with usage of photographic and video materials, emotional headlines and messages. Fake materials which have been outspreaded in online media and social networks are analyzed in the article. The authors found out that fake messages outspreaded in Ukrainian media refer to the following topic. It is stated that the quick expansion of misinformation was facilitated by the fact that the nationals of Ukraine took information without criticism, without fact-checking, since they moved to a new space of life of the individual and made «a stage setting of sense». (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

This paper aims to fill the gap in literature concerning community gardens in post-communist countries by focusing on the situation in Prague, Czechia. It introduces Prague′s newly emerged community gardens and presents the results of a first representative survey of these gardens. Information was gathered about eleven of the sixteen larger community gardens and the data were collected by semi-structured interviews with the managers of the particular gardens. The paper compares the Czech community gardens as representatives of civic agriculture forms (...) in post-communist countries with their counterparts and stresses their similarities and differences. The results show that the new community gardens reflect much of what can be seen elsewhere in terms of spatial and organizational design, as well as reasons for starting them, motivations for participation and some of the challenges experienced. However, in contrast to many community gardens in the USA, Canada and UK that focus on food and nutrition provision, in Prague the community is more of a priority than food and the other mentioned benefits. The paper shows that different activities, events and functions make gardens important hubs of their communities and potential tools of further community involvement and social change. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt es sin duda una de las grandes defensoras de la comunidad política, la cual es integrada por ciudadanos que ejercen su libertad mediante la palabra y la acción en el espacio público. Los elementos fundamentales de la comunidad son la justicia y la igualdad. Pero, aunque Arendt fue teóloga, ella acusa al cristianismo primitivo de haber reducido la libertad pública a lo privado de la persona, realzando el amor y la compasión. Sin embargo, Tönnies y Leroux recuperan la (...) importancia de los lazos fraternos y familiares que pueden formar comunidades sólidas, y cohesionar la vida social para que puedan aflorar el dialogo, los consensos y la opinión ciudadana. Hannah Arendt is undoubtedly one of the great defenders of the political community, which is made up of citizens exercising their freedom through word and action in public space. The key elements of the community are justice and equality. But although Arendt was a theologian, she accuses the primitive Christianity have reduced public release private person, enhancing the love and compassion. However, Tönnies and Leroux recover the importance of family and fraternal bonds that can form strong communities, social life and unite so that they can emerge dialogue, consensus and public opinion. (shrink)

To determine the role Latino community gardens play in community development, open space, and civic agriculture, we conducted interviews with 32 community gardeners from 20 gardens, and with staff from 11 community gardening support non-profit organizations and government agencies. We also conducted observations in the gardens, and reviewed documents written by the gardeners and staff from 13 support organizations and agencies. In addition to being sites for production of conventional and ethnic vegetables and herbs, the gardens host numerous social, (...) educational, and cultural events, including neighborhood and church gatherings, holiday parties, children’s activities, school tours, concerts, health fairs, and voter registration drives. In some cases, the gardens also serve to promote community activism. The primary concern of gardeners is to secure land tenure in the face of pressures to develop the garden sites for housing. The support organizations and agencies provide help with land tenure, as well as with advocacy, organization, and horticultural practices. Although the role of the Latino gardens in community development appears to be more important than their role in open space or agricultural production, the gardens can also be viewed as unique “participatory landscapes” that combine aspects of all three movements, as well as provide a connection between immigrants and their cultural heritage. (shrink)

The article investigates how users in the Czech wireless network community invented a technology for sending data over visible, red light. For five years, this was the most affordable method for connecting computers. The development of this technology was guided by the idea that it should be controlled by its users. With reference to this experiment, it is argued that a shared ethical and/or political vision can contribute to the establishment of norms within user communities encouraging their members to share (...) information with each other. Thus, it is suggested that ethical and political convictions can be crucial for enabling collective innovation processes. This highlighting of normativity is intended as a complement to the common premise in Innovation Studies that users innovate to satisfy unfulfilled needs. In opposition to this view, it is argued that the needs of users are not a constant but something which emerge together with the transformation of the user community and the technology in question. Particular focus is placed on the tension between, on one hand, the norms and ethical— political motives of the user community, and, on the other hand, the needs satisfied through product development, both stemming from the same innovation process. (shrink)

Science communication has traditionally been seen as a means of crossing the boundary of science: moving scientific knowledge into the public. This paper presents an alternative understanding. Drawing upon a particular case of social science communication in the form of an interactive installation about the social responsibility of science, it develops the concept of boundary space where phenomena can simultaneously belong to science and nonscience. In addition, the paper describes how the installation functions as a space for interaction (...) between knowledge communication and knowledge production. The paper argues that we should understand science communication as a social practice, which allows scientists and nonscientists to cooperate in performing science as an important part of society. The aim is to add a new kind of analysis to traditional criticisms of deficit-thinking and popularization by asking what can we say more about science communication if we understand it as part of science as a social activity. (shrink)

A public sphere in which people can freely discuss worldly affairs is arguably an essential building block of deliberative democracies. As a theoretical and historical concept, however, the public sphere concept is far from unequivocal. This article reviews Habermasian public sphere theory and particularly his failure, according to critics, to establish the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ as an historical category. It provides a more realistic historical account that helps to reframe contemporary conceptions of the public sphere. It argues that the 17th (...) century’s culture of pamphleteering created the space for a proto-public sphere, characterized as a complex network of discursive practices mixing commercial doggerel, state-sponsored propaganda and reasoned argument. These practices were part of contradictory but mutually constitutive processes in the context of religious and political struggles that coincided with the gestation of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to understand how multicellular systems realize functionally integrated physiological entities by organizing their intercellular space. From a perspective centered on physiology and integration, biological systems are often characterized as organized in such a way that they realize metabolic self-production and self-maintenance. The existence and activity of their components rely on the network they realize and on the continuous management of the exchange of matter and energy with their environment. (...) One of the virtues of the organismic approach focused on organization is that it can provide an understanding of how biological systems are functionally integrated into coherent wholes. Organismic frameworks have been primarily developed by focusing on unicellular life. Multicellularity, however, presents additional challenges to our understanding of biological systems, related to how cells are capable to live together in higher-order entities, in such a way that some of their features and behaviors are constrained and controlled by the system they realize. Whereas most accounts of multicellularity focus on cell differentiation and increase in size as the main elements to understand biological systems at this level of organization, we argue that these factors are insufficient to provide an understanding of how cells are physically and functionally integrated in a coherent system. In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework to understand multicellularity, capable to overcome these issues. Our thesis is that one of the fundamental theoretical principles to understand multicellularity, which is missing or underdeveloped in current accounts, is the functional organization of the intercellular space. In our view, the capability to be organized in space plays a central role in this context, as it enables (and allows to exploit all the implications of) cell differentiation and increase in size, and even specialized functions such as immunity. We argue that the extracellular matrix plays a crucial active role in this respect, as an evolutionary ancient and specific (non-cellular) control subsystem that contributes as a key actor to the functional specification of the multicellular space and to modulate cell fate and behavior. We also analyze how multicellular systems exert control upon internal movement and communication. Finally, we show how the organization of space is involved in some of the failures of multicellular organization, such as aging and cancer. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Endnotes.