Cultural Politics and Conquest Culture

In this article, the authors explore recent developments in urban regeneration in Istanbul, and specifically in the important historic district of Beyoğlu. In one respect, these developments, which are linked to the promotion of cruise ship tourism, are on the same predictable lines as neoliberal projects in other cities across the world. Significantly, in the Istanbul context, local agency is being sidelined, and projects are being financed and managed through the intervention of the central state. In this Turkish version of urban transformation, however, there is a locally distinctive aspect that merits attention. Istanbul is a city that was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, and the discourse of conquest has remained significant within the urban imaginary. And at the present time, it is being mobilized by the state and its cultural ministry, in the cause of creating a new urban image conforming to its Islamist principles. The key project involves the establishment of what is called the Beyoğlu Cultural Route, which is essentially a touristic itinerary. The authors argue that the state's initiatives, and the route project in particular, involve an erasure—a conquest—of Beyoğlu's legacy of cosmopolitan values. This discussion explores what has been of civic and cultural value in the lifeworld of Beyoğlu, past and present. Resistance to the state's control of resources and institutions, and to its conquest ideology, needs to be grounded in civic principles open to diversity and difference in the city.

The Incompatibility of Motherhood and Professional Women's Football in England

There has been an advancement of professionalisation of women's football globally. Professional women's football in England has grown exponentially since the inception of the Football Association (FA) Women's Super League in 2011. This article offers an examination of the gender-specific needs of women as professional footballers, focusing specifically on the distinctive aspect of maternity policy. Sportswomen often feel compelled to make the difficult decision between motherhood and an athletic career. Contracts have become an essential component of the work-life of professional women footballers. However, these contracts pose questions regarding organisational intentions and motivations. This study draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with professional women footballers in England. Our key considerations include contracts, employment, motherhood, and athletes' bodies. This examination will develop our understanding of the complexities associated with professional football as a career choice for women.

Social welfare and bank performance: evidence from a stochastic neural hybrid MCDM approach

PurposeThis paper investigates the endogenous relationships between banking performance and social welfare in Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries.Design/methodology/approachA comprehensive three-stage multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach based on alternative informational assumptions is applied.FindingsResults indicate that banking performance is paradoxically associated with stagnant economic activity and higher wealth concentration for the minority. The authors found that SADC banking performance promotes higher Human Development Index (HDI) standards possibly via efficient financial intermediation, dissemination of best managerial practices and other forms of positive spillovers in these countries.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the MCDM literature by simultaneously exploring the key concepts of “utility functions” (using COPRAS) and “distance to ideal solutions” (using TOPSIS) in mapping and explaining the feedback and cause-effect processes between banking performance and social welfare that may exist. Another distinctive aspect is related to the computation of bias-free criteria weights, using a robust SWARA order-rank based on information entropy. Finally, this paper is concerning the endogeneity measurement, using a novel stochastic structural relationship non-linear programme.

The Distinct Wrong of Deepfakes

Deepfake technology presents significant ethical challenges. The ability to produce realistic looking and sounding video or audio files of people doing or saying things they did not do or say brings with it unprecedented opportunities for deception. The literature that addresses the ethical implications of deepfakes raises concerns about their potential use for blackmail, intimidation, and sabotage, ideological influencing, and incitement to violence as well as broader implications for trust and accountability. While this literature importantly identifies and signals the potentially far-reaching consequences, less attention is paid to the moral dimensions of deepfake technology and deepfakes themselves. This article will help fill this gap by analysing whether deepfake technology and deepfakes are intrinsically morally wrong, and if so, why. The main argument is that deepfake technology and deepfakes are morally suspect, but not inherently morally wrong. Three factors are central to determining whether a deepfake is morally problematic: (i) whether the deepfaked person(s) would object to the way in which they are represented; (ii) whether the deepfake deceives viewers; and (iii) the intent with which the deepfake was created. The most distinctive aspect that renders deepfakes morally wrong is when they use digital data representing the image and/or voice of persons to portray them in ways in which they would be unwilling to be portrayed. Since our image and voice are closely linked to our identity, protection against the manipulation of hyper-realistic digital representations of our image and voice should be considered a fundamental moral right in the age of deepfakes.

Hedging as a Marker of Variation in Pakistani Research Dissertations of Sciences and Social Sciences

Perspicuous organization and persuasion are required in academic writing for creating unity, making claims, sequencing, and eloquence. Hedging is a distinctive aspect of academic writing. Hedging can be employed as a communicative strategy to decrease or enhance the strength of claims (Hyland, 1998). This research study explores the frequencies and grammatical categories of hedges in the research dissertations written by Pakistani authors. The corpus of the study contains 150 research dissertations of sciences and social sciences. The frequencies and forms of hedges are examined by utilizing Varttala’s (1999) classification of Hedges. Lists of hedges have been developed to identify the different categories of hedges. Instances of hedges have been extracted from the corpora with the help of AntConc 3.5.8 (2019) software. The results reveal that the authors from the field of social sciences are more careful and cautious in making their claims as compared to the sciences.

Happy Numbers in China and Japan

The paper outlines the functioning of cultural practices concerning numbers in Chinese and Japanese mundanity. The formation and use of such symbolic non-mathematical meaning of numbers is a distinctive aspect of linguistic, cultural and axiological systems in the countries of the Far East. The topic seems to be of particular interest due to high attention drawn by number-containing words and idioms in Chinese and Japanese linguistic studies in combination with cultural studies. Such an analysis seeks to develop the approaches to clarifying nation-specific mental representations and cultural aspects of using numeral vocabulary. Non-mathematical meaning of numeral vocabulary should be considered in a differentiated manner depending on factors that shape particular meanings. Religious and cosmogonic mythology as well as oriental philosophy serves as major origins of number-related meanings. Graphic interpretations also produce new associated meanings. The paper mostly delves into the effects of how the phonetics of number-containing words influences their meaning. Homonymy and homophony that are typical of the Chinese language considerably facilitate the process of mounting additional meanings. The axiological and cultural perspective embraces numbers as classifying factors that can be used to stratify the objects. The study of non-traditional meanings in number vocabulary not only allows to reveal the link between culture and language but highlights how cognitive processes operate in linguistics.

Supporting Strong Transitions Remotely: Considerations and Complexities for Rural Communities During COVID-19

Transition education is a distinctive aspect of special education that extends well beyond the boundaries of the school building, engages partners from all corners of the local community, and addresses so many different life domains. In the midst of a pandemic, creative strategies are needed to equip students with the skills, knowledge, experiences, supports, and relationships that prepare them well for a future of flourishing in adulthood. In this article, we describe key features of high-quality transition education and illustrate some of the ways each area might be addressed remotely or at times when being present together is not possible. In addition, guidance is provided on how to ensure educators and service providers are well-prepared for their roles, as rural districts and communities seek ways to equip students and support their transitions using these new approaches.

Enhancing The Supervision Of Undergraduate Major Projects

Most undergraduate students are still required to complete a project of some kind, often in their final year of study. However, levels of student satisfaction on project modules and student outcomes are subject to considerable variation. Project modules sometimes detract from rather than add value to the student experience. Published research in the sector focused on best practice in the supervision of undergraduate projects and dissertations is limited. Using a case study approach, this article considers recent academic staff development interventions focused on enhancing supervision practice from a series of workshops and webinars organised by the authors. The analysis draws from existing module evaluation data, an in-session e-voting tool and end of session written evaluations. It considers the nuances of undergraduate supervision, the challenges that stem from cultural differences between disciplines, and the kinds of challenges faced by students and their supervisors. It argues that supervision at UG level constitutes a separate and distinctive aspect of HE pedagogic practice, and involves inducting the student into a different and often ‘alien’ approach to learning. It provides what the authors hope are some useful reflections on practice and proposes opportunities for developing practice of supervision more widely within the sector at undergraduate level.

A machine-learning history of English caselaw and legal ideas prior to the Industrial Revolution I: generating and interpreting the estimates

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date, there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England's institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, we generate and analyze the first quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and its associated legal ideas. We achieve this in two companion papers. In this, the first of the pair, we build a comprehensive corpus of 52,949 reports of cases heard in England's high courts before 1765. Estimating a 100-topic structural topic model, we name and interpret all topics, each of which reflects a distinctive aspect of English legal thought. We produce time series of the estimated topic prevalences. To interpret the topic timelines, we develop a tractable model of the evolution of legal-cultural ideas and their prominence in case reports. In the companion paper, we will illustrate with multiple applications the usefulness of the large amount of new information generated by our approach.

The Kantian Capacity for Moral Self-Control: Abstraction at Two Levels

As a rule, the Kantian capacity for self-control is interpreted as a kind of tool for compelling ourselves to act on the basis of the maxims we have adopted. To the extent that we merely acknowledge its role in following already-adopted maxims, however, we fail to capture the distinctive aspect of moral self-control identified by Kant. In this paper, I propose a fuller account of the Kantian capacity for moral self-control; I do so mainly by analyzing this capacity as our ability to “abstract from” various sensible impressions. This analysis shows that Kant’s conception of moral self-control involves two intimately related levels, which are subject to different criteria. Whereas the first level is connected to our ability to adopt moral maxims and requires that we abstract from all sensible impressions, the second is associated with our ability to follow these maxims and does not necessarily require this radical abstraction.