Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lesvos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and others, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

Tax Policy in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of Publications in Leading Economic Journals

In the context of the world-long coronavirus pandemic, it is now essential that it is successful to overcome, break out painlessly and restore economic growth as soon as possible. Tax policy has a significant place in solving these problems. The purpose of the review is to identify, generalize and interpret information on the nature, degree of systemicity, depth, quality, discussion, existing trends and trends, synergy of tax policy research in the conditions of the coronacism in leading economic journals to identify problematic and understudied areas of knowledge that are important for tax science and practice, which require an early solution and whose development is the most in-demand in modern historical conditions. The scientific community in any scientific industry, including the tax industry, is required to build a single interconnected system of dynamically and effectively developing knowledge, rather than simply producing a set of interesting but disparate ideas. The research methods are a strategy of identifying keywords and search terms from the sphere of taxation and pandemic, screening sources and their primary filtering, content analysis of selected articles, critical reflection of groups of articles. As a result, it has been revealed that the palette of tax problems in the covid-19 environment explored in the publications of leading economic journals is fairly broad, but it goes beyond the front, not ahead of it develop models of various forward-looking scenarios for alternative tax options in force majeure; a clear interpretation of the pandemic realities of the pressing problems of the tax agenda of the present historical moment; writing new reviews as tax publications emerge between Cand19 and the exit from the medical and economic crisis.

To Rebuild or to Refurbish? An Analysis of the Financial Convenience of Interventions on Urban Consolidated Contexts

In the current historical moment of post-crisis recovery, the real estate sector has a dual role: i) through the construction industry and its impacts on related economic sectors, it is called upon to be an active part of the economic recovery; ii) the enhancement of existing property assets is of primary importance in the containment of greenhouse gases and the achievement of the objectives set by the United Nations [1]. In this context, the various players involved in the real estate market have outlined the importance of being supported by assessment methodologies. That allows to point out not only the opportunities of the investment, but also the risks that may invalidate the initial forecasts, nullifying the success of the initiative. To this end, this research develops a multi-criteria Key Performance Indicator aimed at analyzing the feasibility of real estate initiatives that allows to provide a synthetic scoring on the financial sustainability of each investment and to compare different types of initiatives (e.g. new construction, demolition and reconstruction, renovation, etc.).

Hand-to-Mouth Survival in an Extended Pandemic

In a time of a pandemic, people withdraw in order to social distance to protect themselves against infection. The industries that rely on people interacting in close proximity—the service industries, air travel, and other fields—lose their customers almost overnight, and then they lose their employees. Money and jobs become much more scarce almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, saddled with debt and scarce emergency savings, with a pandemic dragging on now for over a year, with dysfunctional government and little stimulus, many Americans are struggling with debt, homelessness, hunger, pressured social relationships, and other challenges. This work explores some available and recent peer-to-peer personal finance advice on the Social Web (in English) on several social platforms to assess their applicability in a challenging historical moment.

Servant Leadership and the Spirituality of Music in Crisis Management

The ways in which organizations manage crises can find significant analogies in the musician's process of improvisation, involving a continuous leader-follower interaction that displays the typical traits of servant leaders fueled by spirituality. The analogy with musical improvisation is the thread that runs through this chapter, which analyzes servant leadership in organizational orchestration with reference to current issues such as distributed work. The conditions that can enable the development of servant organizations are identified, modeling the different contextual dimensions with reference to organizational performance, also with respect to other leadership styles. These enabling factors are also declined with respect to agile management practices and the convergence between spiritual leadership and servant leadership. New research directions are identified: this transformative historical moment offers a unique opportunity to develop in-depth causal inferences about how servant leadership creates ethical and organizational value.

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s–early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre’s queer resonances, opening up the biopic’s historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers’ engagement with the biopic evokes the genre’s history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema’s legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film.

Reseña del libro A Transnational History of the Internet in Central America, 1985–2000: Networks, Integration and Development / Book Review A Transnational History of the Internet in Central America, 1985–2000: Networks, Integration and Development

“In an era in which the need to protect borders has often been defended, remembering a historical moment that sought to overcome them is also, in essence, a political act in itself” (Siles, 2020: 10). Ignacio Siles, catedrático en la Escuela de Ciencias de la Comunicación de la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), nos presenta un acto político hecho libro que contextualiza lo que ocurría en Centroamérica durante los años en que se fue facilitando la conexión a internet en la región. Siles es doctor en Medios, Tecnología y Sociedad por la Universidad de Northwestern, tras una maestría en Comunicación por la Universidad de Montreal, y una licenciatura en Ciencias de la Comunicación por la Universidad de Costa Rica, donde actualmente es profesor.

Exploring the Book of Fortresses

Duarte de Armas’ Livro das fortalezas or Book of Fortresses illustrates 55 border fortresses in over 180 meticulous measured and annotated renderings. The book is even more impressive given that de Armas completed his on-site survey in a single year (1509) and finished annotating the book the following year. The book’s drawings, alluring in their combination of finite time and enormous space, are difficult to link together at an intra-site or inter-site scale. Consequently, while mapping the 55 border fortresses in the book provides a greater apprehension of a historical, liminal space, this alone does not solve the greater problem of reconstructing de Armas’ methods for rendering place on the Portuguese-Castilian border, nor does it acknowledge the historical moment in which it was produced. This article reconstructs the world of the Book of Fortresses through a novel, digital approach that acknowledges Duarte de Armas’ malleable sense of space rather than ‘rectifying’ his work to match modern geography.

A systematic literature review about the level of digital competences defined by DigCompEdu in higher education

Nowadays, we are facing a historical moment in which education practices are being transformed mainly due to the increase of technologies and their massive use at all levels of society, thus it is necessary to integrate them in educational contexts. In this context, the aim of this paper is to: analyse the level of technological competences of university professors. To this end, a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA methodology is carried out. The search was focused on WoS and SCOPUS databases. Initially, 815 documents have been retrieved and after applying the exclusion criteria 30 papers have been selected. The selected papers have been analysed in detail and the final conclusions have been structured according to DigCompEdu digital competence framework. The results show that the level of Digital Competences of University Professors (DCUP) is moderate and highlight aspects to improve: Reflective Practice is not cited in any article and Learner´s Empowerment and Facilitating Students' Digital Competence are the least referred. These aspects should be considered for future research. For this reason, it is recommended to carry out continuous training for university professors supported by the DigCompEdu framework.

Humans, among Other Classical Animals

This book considers the question of how studying Classics can be relevant at the present moment of environmental and existential crisis. In a series of encounters from the European assimilation and destruction of the New World to our present environmental destruction of our shared world, it explores an answer by demonstrating how the Classics have been implicated in the structures of thought that have ultimately led us to our present historical moment. Telling the story of anthropology’s Classical entanglements from its inception to its growth to critical self-awareness, it demonstrates that Classical ideas have played a crucial—and often deleterious—role in the Western placing of the human and in the discipline that claimed the study of humanity as its own. Responses to our present crisis, it argues, should therefore include, as a prerequisite, considering the origins and implications of these Classical foundations because only by so doing can we attain the full self-awareness necessary to think beyond them and consider the alternatives we now need.