scholarly journals Commentary vs. ’Hymen’?

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó

The paper examines the intertextual structure of Christoph Ransmayr’s novel Die letzte Welt, focusing on the double strategy of integrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the novel’s textual and diegetic level. Borrowing Gérard Genette’s term, it argues that though Ransmayr evokes the structure of a metatextual relationship between his own and Ovid’s work, finally it undermines the distinction between commenting and commented texts. Following a brief survey of the early reception of Ransmayr’s novel and of the political issues raised by critical readings, the essay argues for applying a different textual model that does not presuppose the distinction between original or source and secondary texts, proposing instead the concept of an intrinsic difference as suggested by Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hymen”, that is, a difference working like a dividing and permeable membrane.

Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Ignacio Lago ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Elisabeth Gidengil ◽  
Thomas Gschwend

Voters face different incentives to turn out to vote in one electoral arena versus another. Although turnout is lowest in European elections, it is found that the turnout is only slightly lower in regional than in national elections. Standard accounts suggest that the importance of an election, in terms of the policy-making power of the body to be elected, drives variation in turnout across elections at different levels. This chapter argues that this is only part of the story, and that voter attachment to a particular level also matters. Not all voters feel connected to each electoral arena in the same way. Although for some, their identity and the issues they most care about are linked to politics at the national level, for others, the regional or European level may offer the political community and political issues that most resonate with them.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-35
Author(s):  
Anna Friberg

The article explores some of the composite concepts of democracy that were used in Sweden, primarily by the Social Democrats during the interwar years. Should these be seen as pluralizations of the collective singular democracy or as something qualitatively new? By showing how these concepts relate to each other and to democracy as a whole, the article argues that they should be considered statements about democracy as one entity, that democracy did not only concern the political sphere, but was generally important throughout the whole of society. The article also examines the Swedish parliamentarians' attitudes toward democracy after the realization of universal suffrage, and argues that democracy was eventually perceived as such a positive concept that opponents of what was labeled democratic reforms had to reformulate the political issues into different words in order to avoid coming across as undemocratic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
Melissa Chakars

This article examines the All-Buryat Congress for the Spiritual Rebirth and Consolidation of the Nation that was held in the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in February 1991. The congress met to discuss the future of the Buryats, a Mongolian people who live in southeastern Siberia, and to decide on what actions should be taken for the revival, development, and maintenance of their culture. Widespread elections were carried out in the Buryat lands in advance of the congress and voters selected 592 delegates. Delegates also came from other parts of the Soviet Union, as well as from Mongolia and China. Government administrators, Communist Party officials, members of new political parties like the Buryat-Mongolian People’s Party, and non-affiliated individuals shared their ideas and political agendas. Although the congress came to some agreement on the general goals of promoting Buryat traditions, language, religions, and culture, there were disagreements about several of the political and territorial questions. For example, although some delegates hoped for the creation of a larger Buryat territory that would encompass all of Siberia’s Buryats within a future Russian state, others disagreed revealing the tension between the desire to promote ethnic identity and the practical need to consider economic and political issues.


Res Publica ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
Guido Dierickx

This contribution should be seen as an attempt to retrieve information from restcategories, such as «does not know» and «no answer».  From these, and from other data as well, we constructed 10, mostly summating, indexes of political ignorance. Among them is an index of objective ignorance, that is about political events, persons and situations.  The others aim at more subjective dimensions. Does the respondent feel informed about the political process : about government and party performance, partisan congeniality, modalities of voting, local politics social problems, political issues ?There seems to be some evidence in favor of the following hypotheses.1. The indexes tend to compensate each other: respondents who score low on one index, do not necessarily score low on the next one.2. I t is difficult to ascertain the validity of an index of objective ignorance. Moreover it does by no means express all the (relevant) dimensions of political information.3. A mong indexes of subjective ignorance one should distinguish between «policy» and «political» information ; the latter seems to refer to a situation where strictly political rules of the game, a.o. those of political conflict, prevail.4. Of all indexes the «political issues» index showed the most discriminating power, as well as the most expected associations.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-31
Author(s):  
Kevin Rogan

Critical data studies have made great strides in bringing together data analysts and urban design, providing an extensible concept which is useful in visualizing the role of local and planetary data networks. But in the light of the experience of Sidewalk Labs, critical data studies need a further push. As smart cities, algorithmic urbanisms, and sensorial regimes inch closer and closer to reality, critical data studies remain woefully blind to economic and political issues. Data remains undertheorized for its economic content as a commodity, and the political ramifications of the data assemblages remain locked in a proto-political schema of good and bad uses of this vast network of data collection, analysis, research, and organization. This paper attempts to subject critical data studies to a rigorous critique by deepening its relationship to the history thus far of Sidewalk Labs’ project in Quayside, Toronto. It is broken into sections. The first section discusses the material reality of Kitchin and Lauriault’s (2014) data assemblages and data landscapes. The second section investigates data itself and what its ‘inherent’ value means in an economic sense. The third section looks at the way the understanding of data promoted by the data assemblage effects smart city design. The fourth section examines the role of the designer in shepherding this vision, and moreover the data assemblage, into existence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Katarina Damjanić

The main goal of this paper is to indicate the importance of the issues of vagueness and dissociation in discourse interpretation. The discourse that is taken into consideration is the discourse of political news written in the English language. This particular discourse is widely available to readers and deals with important political issues, which is why the choice of words and phrases should ideally be unbiased and accurate. If not, the readers may misinterpret the discourse and have a wrong impression of the political issue. In this research, newspaper articles are taken as an example of political news discourse. All articles analyzed were written in online British and American broadsheet and tabloid newspapers and they all dealt with the migrant crisis and 2019 Hong Kong protests. By taking into consideration the political context and the theoretical framework used in this research, 44 instances considered to be examples of vagueness and dissociation were identified, which were found in 14 newspaper articles.


Author(s):  
Prasun Chakraborty* ◽  
◽  
Anirban Chowdhury ◽  

Indian society changed after digitalization and economical reformation. Currently, the Facebook is the most popular social media in India. The political cartoonist took that platform as an opportunity to share their thoughts and raise socio-political issues through their cartoons. The aim of the paper is to study responses (likingness and affective) to political cartoons in respect to responsiveness towards cartoons, gender, and socio-economic status. The study was conducted among 875 Indians from different parts of India including males and females with various socio-economic backgrounds. The data captured in the form of sentiments (love, sadness, angry and happiness emotions) for each cartoon shared in the Facebook timeline. Then, relevant descriptive statistics were computed using IBM SPSS 20.0 software. Results showed that maximum Facebook users expressed their thoughts about political cartoons through emoticons in terms of like, sad, angry, and happiness. It is found that male user are more likely to be expressive to political cartoons than female user. Mostly user from low and middle socio-economic backgrounds relate themselves with the cartoon scenarios and shown interest than users from higher class of the society. Hence, political socio-political scenarios can be communicated effectively using political cartoons in Facebook as the people of India are relating themselves with various cartoons.


Author(s):  
Serhiy Danylenko ◽  
Olena Shcherbatiuk

The political instrumentalization of the history of Ukraine carried out by the Russian Federation in the framework of the information war against Ukraine is covered in this article. This instrumentalization is exercised through media communication employing historical and political myths and narratives to vindicate Russia’s aggressive actions. The latest information and communication technologies used by the Kremlin in the information war against Ukraine have been identified in this paper. Such destructive efforts often derail Ukrainian-Polish relations, which are particularly sensitive to historical and political issues. The reasons for the drawbacks of the Ukrainian authorities in counteracting the information aggression on the part of the Russian Federation are distinguished, and the measures that would contribute to an effective response to such aggression are outlined.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan C. Busby ◽  
Adam J. Howat ◽  
Jacob E. Rothschild ◽  
Richard M. Shafranek

In the United States, politics has become tribal and personalized. The influence of partisan divisions has extended beyond the political realm into everyday life, affecting relationships and workplaces as well as the ballot box. To help explain this trend, we examine the stereotypes Americans have of ordinary Democrats and Republicans. Using data from surveys, experiments, and Americans' own words, we explore the content of partisan stereotypes and find that they come in three main flavors—parties as their own tribes, coalitions of other tribes, or vehicles for political issues. These different stereotypes influence partisan conflict: people who hold trait-based stereotypes tend to display the highest levels of polarization, while holding issue-based stereotypes decreases polarization. This finding suggests that reducing partisan conflict does not require downplaying partisan divisions but shifting the focus to political priorities rather than identity—a turn to what we call responsible partisanship.


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