scholarly journals Irpinia Earthquake and History: A Nexus as a Problem

Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Giovanni Lombardi

Forty years from the 23 November 1980, Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake date represents much more than a commemoration. It has been a fracture for the history of Italy. Important for many reasons, this earthquake has been a watershed for the studies and the public role of research. Historians have been solicited to work on the topic by scholars of the geological and seismological sciences: in the face of the repetition of disastrous seismic events in Italy, earthquakes remained ‘outside the history’. However, the real difficulty of socio-historical science is not neglecting seismic events and their consequences, but rather the reluctance to think of ‘earthquake’ as a specific interpretative context. This means to deal with the discipline ‘statute’ as well as the public commitment of scholars. In this way, the circle earthquake-history-memory requires broad interdisciplinarity, which offers insights to work on historical consciousness and cultural memory: important aspects to understand the past as well as to favour a seismic risk awareness.

This book explores the history of health care in postcolonial state-making and the fragmentation of the health system in Syria during the conflict. It analyzes the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in enabling attacks on health facilities and distinguishes the differences between humanitarian solutions and refugee populations’ expectations. It also describes the way in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy. The book highlights the lived experience of siege in all its layers. It examines how humanitarian actors have become part of the information wars that have raged throughout the past ten years and how they have chosen to position themselves in the face of grave violations of IHL.


Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Jan Alexander van Nahl

Many Humanities scholars seem to have become increasingly pessimistic due to a lack of success in their efforts to be recognized as a serious player next to their science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) colleagues. This appears to be the result of a profound uncertainty in the self-perception of individual disciplines within the Humanities regarding their role both in academia and society. This ambiguity, not least, has its roots in their own history, which often appears as an interwoven texture of conflicting opinions. Taking a stance on the current and future role of the Humanities in general, and individual disciplines in particular thus asks for increased engagement with their own past, i.e., histories of scholarship, which are contingent on societal and political contexts. This article’s focus is on a case study from the field of Old Norse Studies. In the face of the rise of populism and nationalism in our days, Old Norse Studies, with their focus on a ‘Germanic’ past, have a special obligation to address societal challenges. The article argues for the public engagement with the histories of individual disciplines to strengthen scholarly credibility in the face of public opinion and to overcome trenches which hamper attempts at uniting Humanities experts and regaining distinct social relevance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Kontowski ◽  
Madelaine Leitsberger

European universities responded in different ways to the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015. Some subscribed to the agenda of higher education (HE) as a universal human right, while others stressed different long-term benefits of offering access to it. Yet, the unprecedented sense of moral urgency that guided immediate declarations of support and subsequent actions has largely remained unaddressed. With the crisis becoming a new reality for many countries, HE has a role to play in the social inclusion of refugees, even in countries that were not attractive destinations for refugees in the past. In this article, we provide an overview of the reasons why HE institutions supported refugees, and present the results of an empirical study of Poland and Austria during the 2015–2016 academic year. We then evaluate those first responses utilizing parts of Ager and Strang’s framework of integration, and discuss issues of institutional readiness, capabilities and the public role of HE stemming from this comparison. Our findings suggest that reasons such as acknowledgement of basic rights, or utilizing social capital are insufficient to explain and understand strong integrative support measures. We propose that refugee support by HE institutions is both better understood and promoted through the language of hospitality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Antônia Rosa Almeida ◽  
João Bartolomeu Rodrigues ◽  
Levi Leonido Fernandes da Silva ◽  
Elsa Maria Gabriel Morgado

Since man is a man, history has been responsible for showing the progress of life in society and, analyzing the foundations of education, one can understand the advances and setbacks in the segments that support it. One must remember the importance and meaning of education to realize it”s contribution to people in particular and to humanity in general. For women, education is a great example of building for citizenship. Female empowerment and its entire universe overlap with the history of education, with the infinite property through the consolidation of social struggles and female resistance to what was imposed by society. The march of women made the role of education multiply in the face of more varied realities, whether in the rural environment or in the urban environment, in the most different spaces. It is known that the motivation for the search for knowledge in the circumstances in which women lived in the past was decisive for being the provocateur of women's empowerment, because it is a right for all, in the journey of the whole social force, family, religion, politics, culture, and work. In what was proposed by the advent of the role in the life of women, it is perceived that the force linked to power, wanting to learn have become more accessible to women and this development throughout life marks the vicissitudes that education manifested in the life of each individual.


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Mamadou Diawara

The dawn of the history of the kingdom of Jaara, during the era of the Jawara dynasty (from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century) is shaped by the story of Daaman Gille and his companions, the most important of whom is Jonpisugo. The lives of these two characters—linked up until their death at Banbagede, where their tombs are only a few hundred meters apart—were the subject of a rich oral literature, all the more noteworthy given the rarity of written documents.In my earlier work (Diawara 1985, 1989, 1990) I discussed the typology of narratives and the specific role of women servants as historians of their social group. The oral sources include family traditions from all social classes, except for recently acquired slaves; the recitals of professional narrators who were by heredity in the service of protector families whose history they proclaimed to the public; the narratives of servants, including the tanbasire, a collection of women's songs from among the royal servants, or the accounts of people who, with their ancestors, had long been slaves (cf. Diawara 1990).Historical chance brings together Daama and Jonpisugo, but their respective social standing differentiates them; just as “friendship” brings together the master and the servant, so the struggle for power leads to the birth of differences in the conception of “the things of the past” among their descendants. How is the past constructed and lived differently by their respective progeny or supposed descendants? What poetic license accrues to the offspring of he who was only a servant, even if he was a royal servant? The response to this question explains the dynamic of a particular servants' oral documentation.


Race & Class ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Siddiqui

Two landmark books, originally published during the same era of struggle in the UK, have been republished in 2018: Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain and Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. These books make the history of anti-racism in the UK – and the role of black and Asian women within this that is so often overlooked – accessible to a broad audience and give context to the gendered racism and racialised patriarchies that persist today. Reviewing these reissued texts, the author argues that the UK’s radical history is a powerful tool that can reactivate anti-racist feminism both locally and internationally, pointing to the continued fight to retain BAME domestic violence refuges in the face of austerity cuts in the UK and the unique global solidarity that is coming to the fore as an emboldened far Right attacks women’s rights internationally.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Boldizzoni

In his response to Arjo Klamer, Wolfgang Streeck and Adam Tooze, Francesco Boldizzoni continues his reflection on the public role of history, dwelling in particular on the uses and abuses of the past, history’s problematic relationship with the social sciences, and the concept of “historical agnosticism.” He concludes that the neutralization of history, and the construction of atemporal narratives, has gone hand in hand with the Atlanticization of politics.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHAN RUDERER

AbstractThis article analyses the history of the military clergy and contrasts its role in the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships on the basis of new, previously inaccessible sources. It is argued here that, in addition to its ideological orientation, two further factors explain differences in the influence of the military clergy on the two regimes: first, the structural position that the Military Vicariates occupied between the Church and the armed forces, and, second, the two dictatorships’ different needs for legitimisation. The analysis provides information relevant to understanding the public role of the Catholic Church and the dimensions of violence during the regimes.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


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