scholarly journals Ubi bene ibi Colonia

2012 ◽  
pp. 43-46
Author(s):  
Helen Esther Luettgen

Ubi bene ibi Colonia is a term with unknown roots and is a derivation of a quote by Cicero (Patria est, ubicumque est bene). Its modern translation “The place that is beautiful is Cologne” (or rather “Cologne is where the heart is”) is a version of the idiom “Home is where the heart is,” and expresses the immense pride that the citizens of Cologne have for their city. It has become part of the colloquial language in Cologne and can be found on souvenir items such as T-shirts, mugs and stickers. I have chosen this motto, as it best describes the topic of this article, which focuses on one particular aspect of my PhD thesis entitled “Religion, Identity and the Public Sphere in 16th Century Cologne,” namely identity formation through representations of the city. In this study, I provide a small glimpse into the history of the cartography of Cologne, ...

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-407
Author(s):  
Peter Gilles ◽  
Evelyn Ziegler

Abstract In this article we outline how corpus-based studies can contribute to the methodology of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic-landscape research can be roughly understood as the “study of writing on display in the public sphere” (Coulmas 2009: 14). From a historical perspective, we investigate the emergence and use of the public sphere as a place of attention for official top-down communication in Luxembourg. Based on a large corpus of public announcements of the municipality of the city of Luxembourg, the history of public top-down communication is analysed by taking into account both sociolinguistic and linguistic factors. The analysis reveals that the public announcements are increasingly typographically and linguistically adapted to the conditions of public perception and self-reading in the course of time – whereby initially the multimodal embedding of the older presentation form is maintained.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-67
Author(s):  
Dijana Alic

On 6 april 1992, the european union (eu) recognised bosnia and hercegovina as a new independent state, no longer a part of the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia. The event marked the start of the siege of sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years, until late february 1996. It became the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, outlasting the leningrad enclosure by a year. During its 1425 days, more than 11,500 people were killed. The attacks left a trail of destruction across the city, which began to transform it in ways not experienced before. This paper explores how the physical transformation of sarajevo affected the ways in which meaning and significance were assigned to its built fabric. I argue that the changes imposed by war and the daily destruction of the city challenged long-established relationships between the built fabric and those who inhabited the city, introducing new modes of thinking and interpreting the city. Loosely placing the discussion within the framework of ‘Thirdspace', established by urban theorist and cultural geographer edward soja, i discuss the relationship that emerged between the historicality, sociality and spatiality of war-torn sarajevo. Whether responding to the impacts of physical destruction or dramatic social change, the nexus of time, space and being shows that the concept of spatiality is essential to comprehending the world and to adjusting to and resisting the impact of extraordinary circumstances. Recognising the continuation of daily life as essential to survival sheds light on processes of renewal and change in a war-affected landscape. These shattered urban spaces also show the ways in which people make a sense of place in relation to specific socio-historical environments and political contexts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Piotr Zbróg

The beginnings of the shaping of social representations of borrowings in the public sphereThe article presents an initial phase of the process of shaping of social representations of borrowings. The aim was to obtain a view of the way in which participants of the public sphere talked about these elements of language, how they perceived them as well as what common sense image was created on this basis in the communication sphere and how it was modified. The first judgements and opinions on the matter of foreign words appeared around the 16th century and evolved from that moment. The theory of social representations developed by Serge Moscovici was applied as a theoretical and methodological basis of the description. Its research tools allow us to see the way in which societies construct meanings of matters important to them. On the basis of the analysis of the material it was established that from the beginning there were rather antagonistic elements of social representations of borrowings. The functionality of borrowings was noticed. Yet it was postulated that they should be eliminated from texts on account of the necessity to develop the native language, the incomprehensibility of statements as well as the excessive trend of foreignness.


Author(s):  
Yuliya Kuzovenkova ◽  

The last two decades have been a time of serious transformation of youth subcultures. Researchers speak about the formation of the postmodernism paradigm of subculture and the virtualisation of sociocultural phenomena. The subcultural subject and the power that formed it continue to exist in the new realities, but are undergoing a transformation. Changes having occured to the public sphere were especially significant for a subcultural entity since it is the public sphere where a subcultural entity can present itself to authorities, thereby maintaining its social subsistence. Our research was aimed at studying how the transformation of the public sphere has affected the entity’s subculture. For the study, the authors employed the method of a qualitative half-structurated interview and draw on the disciplinary authority concept suggested by M. Foucault. The analysis was based on materials of interviewing some representatives of the graffiti subculture in the city of Samara (twenty-two people) from 2016 to 2018. The author has established that the subcultural subject is processual and dependent on the practices in use; a change in practices leads to a change in the subject. Changes of practices in the graffiti subculture were a result of the virtualisation of culture. The author has identified the changes that have taken place in the subcultural subject under the influence of the transformation of the public sphere (the ‘short time’ of instantaneous fame prevails over the ‘long time’ of the symbolic capital of the nickname, new space-time coordinates within which the entity exists, the ‘digital body’ of the subcultural entity becomes ever more informative rather than that which was created via sketches placed in urban space). Unlike the public sphere, the private sphere under the influence of a subculture ideology remains unchanged.


Author(s):  
Will Hanley

The public sphere of the bourgeois effendiya, reflected in the sources that dominate the historiography Egypt before World War One, engaged only a narrow set of ideas about political membership. But police and legal records show that many residents of Egypt relied on a more generic and flexible label—“local”—which they refined in contradistinction to foreign nationalities. The term had a clear social meaning, particularly in imperial context, where it was a polite synonym of “native.” Localness began to gather a legal garb, particularly in the sphere of social rights such as education and government employment, until it began to resemble a nationality. This chapter argues that one key to explaining Egypt’s political quiescence between 1882 and 1919 is recognizing identity formation taking place under the banner of “local” status, rather than the more familiar category of Egyptian national citizen, which emerged only in the decades that followed.


Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell

This chapter tells the story of public speaking in Russia from the imposition of greater restrictions on the public sphere in 1867 through to the eve of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881. It shows that in this period the focus of the Russian public switched from the zemstvo to the courtroom, where a number of high-profile trials took place (and were reported, sometimes in stenographic detail, in the press). The chapter examines the careers and profiles of some of Russia’s leading courtroom orators. It also explores the activities of the Russian socialists (populists), in particular the ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1873–4 and later propaganda efforts in the city and the courtroom. It ends by considering the intensification of public discourse at the end of the 1870s: the Russo-Turkish War saw a surge of patriotic mobilization, but at the same time the populist adoption of terrorism seized public attention.


Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.


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