Personal stories in migration museums and our notions of hospitality: A case study from France’s National Museum of the History of Immigration

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110168
Author(s):  
Helga Lenart-Cheng

The number of migration museums is growing all over the world. These new museums seek to actively shape debates about immigration, and they often rely on immigrants’ personal stories to engage museum visitors and immigrant communities in dialogue. The article uses the case study of France’s National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris and its collection of personal stories (The Gallery of Gifts) to explore this new form of story-activism and our concepts of hospitality. Drawing on Hélène du Mazaubrun’s, Jacques Derrida’s, Joan Stavo-Debauge’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about gifting, hospitality, and recognition, I examine some challenging politico-ethical questions prompted by these immigrant story exhibitions.

Author(s):  
Juliane Fürst

Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland does what the title promises. It takes readers on a journey into a world few knew existed: the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies, who in the face of disapproval and repression created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting, manipulating, and shaping it to their late socialist environment. This book is a quasi-guide into the underground hippieland, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study in the power of transnational youth cultures. It tells the almost forgotten story of how in the late sixties hippie communities sprang up across the Soviet Union, often under the tutelage of a few rebellious youngsters coming from privileged households at the heart of the Soviet establishment. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival against the odds—hippies were harassed by police, shorn of their hair by civilian guards, and confined in psychiatric hospitals by doctors who believed nonconformism was a symptom of schizophrenia. It also advances a surprising argument: despite obvious antagonism the land of Soviet hippies and the world of late socialism were not incompatible. Indeed, Soviet hippies and late socialist reality meshed so well that the hostile, yet stable, relationship that emerged was in many ways symbiotic. Ultimately, it was not the KGB but the arrival of capitalism in the 1990s that ended the Soviet hippie sistema.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Little ◽  
Alison Winch

Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking ofGoogle engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men. Damore, asserting that his document ‘was absolutely consistent with what he’d seen online’, instantly became an ambivalent hero of the alt-right. Like the men who own and run the companies of Silicon Valley, the software engineer subscribes to the idea that the world can be understood and altered through the rigorous application of the scientific method. And as he draws on bodies of knowledge from evolutionary psychology and mathematical biology, we see how the core belief structures of Silicon Valley, when transferred from the technical to the cultural and social domain, can reproduce the sort of misogynistic ‘rationalism’ that fuels the alt-right. We argue that Damore’s memo is in line with Google’s ideology of ‘dataism’: that is the belief that the world can be reduced to decontextualised information and subject to quantifiable logics.Through its use of dataism, the memo reveals much about the similarities and continuities between Damore, the ideas laid out n his memo, and Google itself. Rather than being in opposition, these two entities are jostling for a place in the patriarchal structures of a new form of capitalism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
CHRISTINA PÖSSEL

This paper takes the case study of a well-known but also rather poorly-regarded text, Ratpert of St Gall's Casus Sancti Galli, to examine some of the methodological issues of modern historians reading medieval historians. It is argued that features of Ratpert of St Gall's monastic history which modern readers have found frustrating or even boring were actually the result of the author's specific rhetorical strategies and ideas of history. Ratpert developed an innovative way of writing the history of a Christian community in the mortal world. Unlike other monastic historians who were developing the genre at the time and who followed more hagiographical models, Ratpert chose to put the anonymous, timeless collective of the monks at the centre of his text. His idea of history suggests a lack of effective human agency in the world, in which ups and downs forever follow one another, and contrasts this with the eternity of God.


1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-322
Author(s):  
David Sturdy

Consider this statement: the practice of science influences and is influenced by the civilization within which it occurs. Or again: scientists do not pursue their activities in a political or social void; like other people, they aspire to make their way in the world by responding to the values and social mechanisms of their day. Set in such simple terms, each statement probably would receive the assent of most scholars interested in the history of science. But there is need for debate on the nature and extent of the interaction between scientific activity and the civilization which incorporates it, as there is on the relations of scientists to the society within which they live. This essay seeks to make a contribution mainly to the second of these topics by taking a French scientist and academician of the eighteenth century and studying him and his family in the light of certain questions. At the end there will be a discussion relating those questions or themes to the wider debate. There is an associated purpose to the exercise: to present an account of the social origins and formation of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chomel (botanist, physician and member of the Academic des Sciences) which will augment our knowledge of this particular savant.


2014 ◽  
Vol 556-562 ◽  
pp. 6631-6637
Author(s):  
Somchai Seviset

China has had her relations with Thailand for many centuries since the Sukhothai Period (A.D. 1250-1438) including trade contact, diplomatic relations set forth as per an abundance of documentary evidences, architectural works, and artistic object with significant artistic evidences of a long history of Thai-China relations. In Ayutthaya Period (A.D.1350-1767) which was corresponding to China’s Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644) there were Xi Yuan’s supporting written literature (A.D. 1565-1628). He was a Chinese historian who noted that China sent a large junk ship for trade to Ayutthaya fetching goods of silk, and chinaware from China for sale to Siam Court. Thai Traditional Cupboard Furniture in the past also had an interesting mix of Chinese art. Chinese artwork which appeared in the Thai Traditional Cupboard Furniture made from hardwood with surrounding decoration around it were created during the period of A.D. 18-19. From a number of Thai ancient cupboard furniture exhibited in the Phra Nakhon National Museum (the Largest National Museum in Bangkok Metropolis). This case study will explain the inspiration of Chinese art which the Thai craftsmen applied on the design to decorate the cupboard.


2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Jelena Grazio

The following article deals with technical terminology in the field of music. Its intention is to present a chronological-contrastive analysis of musical terminology in Slovene music theory textbooks written up until the end of the World War II, exemplified by the terms selected. The author emphasizes the importance of such research for musicology, presents current contributions in this area and describes the history of musical textbooks that have been used as corpus for the analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-33
Author(s):  
Islam Sargi Sargi

After the outbreak of the Syrian war, the armed resistance of the Kurds against the radical Islamists drew considerable attention from across the world. Although the Kurdish movement has a history of forty years of armed fight in the region, especially against Turkey, they gained global fame during the war in Syria. Apart from media attention to the resistance of women, in particular, the establishment of a political system, democratic confederalism, which the world was not familiar with, came to exist in the area liberated from the religious fundamentalists in Syria. The Kurds during the Syrian civil war, on one hand, gained international fame for their fight against the radical Islamists; on the other hand, they put a new theory of governance, democratic confederalism, in practice in northern Syria. This paper seeks to provide a brief review of the theory of democratic confederalism and its practices in Rojava to build an argument regarding its future. This case study aims to explore how and why the theory and practices of democratic confederalism co-exist and which factors may influence the Rojava revolution’s future. This review’s central argument is that while democratic confederalism is a revolution in the field, it is also an experiment whose future depends on how the people will adopt it and how the global and regional powers will approach it.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alireza Aminisefat ◽  
Khadigh Saravani

: In December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases, caused by a newly identified coronavirus, occurred in Wuhan, China, named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO). We present a 60-year-old woman with a four-day history of headache, myalgia, and weakness. She reported no shortness of breath or chest pain. Her blood pressure was 15/6 mmHg, and she had a history of hypertension. The laboratory tests showed only thrombocytopenia with a platelet count of 30 × 109 /L, and chest CT showed bilateral ground-glass opacities, so she received treatment with three drugs. One day after recovery and discharge from the hospital, she suffered cardiopulmonary arrest at home. Patients with cardiovascular disease are at a higher risk of COVID-19 infection. Therefore, it is necessary to pay particular attention to cardiac injuries caused by viral infections both during and after the treatment of these patients.


Author(s):  
Alicia Orea-Giner ◽  
Trinidad Vacas Guerrero

Objective: The identification of museum attributes is essential when analysing the different factors that attract visitors and studying it in order to improve efficiency in museums, as this could affect the use of funds for developing a marketing campaign to attract visitors. This paper offers a literature review that considers museum visits and museum attributes before proposing a methodology. Methodology: The use of big data applied to tourism research is vital, as it allows for the consideration of the opinions of museum visitors. The case study in this paper is the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, Spain. The method for identifying the attributes consists of a textual analysis of TripAdvisor reviews written in English (2500) and Spanish (2500). The information is captured using WebHarvy and is analysed using Nvivo12. Results: After analysing the thousand words that were used most frequently, the main attributes were detected, as well as whether the perception of these attributes was positive or negative. The museum’s location and the building itself were the most highly valued attributes. Other attributes that were valued positively were the peripheral services of the museum, such as its food and beverage services. Limitations: The main limitation is that TripAdvisor is not an entirely reliable source of information, so it will be necessary to obtain more reviews to analyse.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-504
Author(s):  
Tomasz Zarycki

This article proposes to look at the current moment in the recent history of the so-called Central-European countries, with Poland as a critical case study, through a structural comparison with an earlier historical cycle, that is one of the first three decades of the communist rule in the region. Thus, I propose to compare the social and economic situation in Poland of circa 1975 with that of 2019, so 30 years after the establishment of a new given political order (30 years after 1945 and 1989 respectively). The paper will offer a general overview of the trajectory of Poland in the post-war era, based primarily on the perspective of the world-system theory and that of the critical sociology of elites, one which will also point to the essential structural contexts of the post-communist dynamics of society. This paper will be based on a basic observation: even if both the 1970s and late 2010s can be considered as periods of relative political stabilization and economic growth for the region as such, and Poland in particular, these countries are, at the same time, subjected to a considerable and even increasing economic dependence on the Western core. In the conclusions, it is argued that the proposed comparative approach, taking into account both an earlier historical cycle and the broader structural dependency of the region, may allow to cast a new light on the nature of current dynamics in Polish politics as well as on the possible future trajectories of the country.


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