Familiar Categories Research Articles

Transformations of discrete closure systems

Discrete systems such as sets, monoids, groups are familiar categories. The internal structure of the latter two is defined by an algebraic operator. In this paper we concentrate on discrete systems that are characterized by unary operators; these include choice operators σ, encountered in economics and social theory, and closure operators φ, encountered in discrete geometry and data mining. Because, for many arbitrary operators α, it is easy to induce a closure structure on the base set, closure operators play a central role in discrete systems.

The economic crisis seen from the everyday

The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us to focus on commonality, rather than difference, when it comes to collectively reclaiming the ‘right to the city’. Focusing on the political, social and affective consequences of the presence of nouveau poor on the streets of Athens, I argue that the shock waves that Greece's nouveau poor send down Europe's spine are partly due to the fact that Athens' new ranks of beggars are not migrants, junkies, alcoholics or homeless; they do not fall in any of the familiar categories of the urban ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’. As they belonged, until very recently, to the mainstream aspiring middle classes, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ‘other’ them, ignore them or dismiss them politically, or socially. The presence of Europe's very own ranks of middle class-come-poor begs for a reconceptualisation of the link between urban theory and praxis.

Modifications: Lattice-valued structures

Several important topological concepts such as regularity, local compactness, and local boundedness are investigated in the category of lattice-valued convergence spaces. These definitions coincide with the usual ones in familiar categories.

Perception of Talker Age by Young Adults with High-Functioning Autism

People with high-functioning Autism (HFA) can accurately identify social categories from speech, but they have more difficulty connecting linguistic variation in the speech signal to social stereotypes associated with those categories. In the current study, the perception and evaluation of talker age by young adults with HFA was examined. The participants with HFA performed similarly to a typically-developing comparison group in age classification and estimation tasks. Moreover, the participants with HFA were able to differentiate among talkers of different ages in a language attitudes task and rated older talkers as more intelligent than younger talkers. These results suggest that people with HFA are able to make reasonable social judgments about talkers based on their speech, at least for familiar social categories and personally relevant social attitudes.

Generic language facilitates children's cross-classification

Four studies examined the role of generic language in facilitating 4- and 5-year-old children's ability to cross-classify. Participants were asked to classify an item into a familiar (taxonomic or script) category, then cross-classify it into a novel (script or taxonomic) category with the help of a clue expressed in either generic or specific language. Experiment 1 showed that generics facilitate 5-year-olds’ and adults’ cross-classification when expressed at an appropriate level of generalization (e.g., “foods” and “birthday party things”), whereas Experiment 2 showed that such effects disappeared when labels were at an inappropriate level of generalization (e.g., “pizzas” and “balloons”). Experiments 3 and 4 offered additional controls. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that language can guide and direct children's multiple categorizations.

The Jerusalem Arbitration Center

Disputes between Palestinians and Israelis might be considered an ever-present fixture in discussions at the Annual Meeting, in one form or another. Given the frequent breaches in peace and the epic questions of international law that are implicated in any potential solution, it is understandably a topic of perpetual interest at almost any gathering of international lawyers, diplomats, and law students and law scholars. This year, however, that seemingly familiar category had a decidedly different twist. A new series launched by the Program Committee at the 2012 Annual Meeting, entitled ASIL IDEAS, selected as one of its inaugural topics the soon-to-be-launched Jerusalem Arbitration Center, or JAC. The purpose of the IDEAS series is to provide a platform for forward-thinking individuals to share their innovative ideas. The JAC is just such an innovative idea, conceived and on the eve of implementation by its forward-thinking founders. The underlying economic and practical need for the JAC is palpable and pressing. Despite political conflicts, every year Israelis and Palestinians engage in an estimated US$4 billion in trade. Israel is by far Palestine's largest trading partner and, according to some estimates, Palestine is Israel's second-largest trading partner after the United States. As with any commercial transactions, disputes sometimes arise out of these exchanges. In those disputes, Israelis can bring claims in Israeli courts, and Palestinians can bring claims in Palestinian courts. But neither party wants (or in some instances is able) to participate in proceedings in the courts of the other party's jurisdiction. Moreover, in both directions, enforcement can be difficult, if not impossible. The JAC is designed to solve these problems. International arbitration has a long history of providing fair, neutral, and reliable dispute resolution for parties from different cultural and legal traditions. In the absence of arbitration, particularly those between Palestinians and Israelis, international commercial exchanges are inevitably hampered by self-help, cumbersome and expensive financing, or piecemeal contractual arrangements. The JAC could provide a better alternative for Israeli-Palestinian exchanges by eliminating expensive work-arounds and increasing the amounts invested in profitable exchanges. In this respect, the JAC is premised on mutual self-interest. Against this backdrop, the structure of the Jerusalem Arbitration Center is designed to be a symbol of the equality and empowerment that it seeks to ensure through its arbitral processes. Its legal form will be a joint venture, with ownership shared equally between the International Chamber of Commerce of Israel (ICC Israel) and the new ICC Palestine, which was specially created for the purpose of participating in the JAC. It also enjoys support from the ICC in Paris. In addition to the prestige of its name, the ICC in Paris has promised to provide essential guidance and international support in everything from selecting the board of the JAC, to management of an arbitral institution, to establishing its internal accounting system. The joint venture agreement and arbitral rules are being developed jointly by Palestinians and Israelis, with input from the ICC in Paris. Administration of the JAC will also be divided equally among Palestinian and Israelis, with several international figures on its board and in some of its internal administrative positions. While the JAC itself will be headquartered in Jerusalem, there are plans to build contact centers in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, the respective homes of the ICC Palestine and the ICC Israel. Even if the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority disagree on many things, they have both committed support to establishment of the JAC. As a practical matter, there have been and are many significant challenges for the JAC. For this reason, it is especially interesting to learn some personal background about those individuals who presented the JAC at the Annual Meeting and who have been working tirelessly, and often against the odds, to make the JAC a reality. …

A history of the Japanese language (review)

Reviewed by: A history of the Japanese language J. Marshall Unger A history of the Japanese language. By Bjarke Frellesvig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xxiv, 436. ISBN 9780521653206. $130 (Hb). The late Samuel E. Martin’s monumental reference works (1987, 1988 [1975]) provide thorough answers to a wide variety of questions about the history of Japanese but do not present it in a chronological narrative. Takeuchi 1999 tries to do that, but rather unsatisfactorily; it is both too freighted and idiosyncratic. So are Bentley 2001 and Vovin 2003, 2004, 2008, which in any case do not deal with all stages of the language. Neither do recent essays on premodern grammar by scholars of literature such as McCullough (1988), Shirane (2005), and Wixted (2006). Though perhaps better than Sansom 1928, Henderson 1948, or Morris 1966, which they superseded, as linguistic studies they are no more adequate. Shibatani (1990) felicitously includes Ainu along with Japanese, but, like Tsujimura (2007), concentrates on modern phonological and syntactic theory, making short shrift of diachronic matters. Hence, when pressed for a general one-volume treatment in English of Japanese language history, one has had little choice for a generation but to fall back on Miller 1967, for all its shortcomings. The field therefore owes a great debt of gratitude [End Page 911] to Bjarke Frellesvig for producing this comprehensive, well-organized, and eminently useful monograph. It not only does the job splendidly but also sweeps away cobwebs and introduces some fresh perspectives on the premodern language. The list price is daunting, but there is an electronic version libraries can purchase, so I assigned the book in a graduate course last spring with a clear conscience. It is unburdened by excessive scholarly apparatus,1 and, though many pages demand careful reading, it should be accessible to Japanese area specialists provided they are willing to familiarize themselves with some linguistic terminology and are not intimidated by snippets of the International Phonetic Alphabet. My students and I found only a few, small production errors.2 The two brief chapters on Eastern dialects (151–54, 397–402) and scattered remarks on other dialects leave a number of questions unanswered,3 but remind readers not to forget dialectal diversification. The chapter on modern phonology (384–89) seems too brief,4 but is to some extent supplemented by a concluding chapter (403–12) on ‘westernization’. Specific strengths of the book include F’s care in distinguishing historical sound changes from synchronic morphophonemic processes and his systematic explanation of how they interacted stage by stage. F gives Japanese inflectional morphology a new description (the familiar categories of Japanese school grammar are confined to pp. 114–18 and 344–50), and though one can quibble over nomenclature,5 his theory represents a major step forward. Some may take issue with analyses that challenge traditional claims (e.g. about the Old Japanese ‘modal past’ -(i)kyeri and adjective morphology, 72–76), but they are always insightful. F carefully points out the absence of attestations of certain predictable forms in critical paradigms and lexical strata at various stages, and suggests promising lines of internal reconstruction. Also noteworthy are F’s efforts to clarify the complex ways in which Chinese has influenced Japanese speech and writing. He does this principally by introducing a distinction between Sino-Japanese (SJ), which ‘became established at the very end of the EMJ [Early Modern Japanese] period’ (279), and ‘Japano-Chinese’ (J-Ch): ‘SJ is a nativization of J-Ch, removing it from the realm of a foreign language and providing a nativized pronunciation norm of kanji, which derives from J-Ch, but which in contrast to J-Ch is in full conformity with Japanese phonology and can be used within Japanese’ (278). It seems, however, that F overreaches when, in discussing the kind of assimilation called renjō, he makes use of this distinction to argue that SJ words like sanmi ‘third rank’ < *san-wi do not, as commonly believed, imply EMJ /sam/ ‘three’ despite Middle Chinese *sam: [End Page 912] [R]ather than positing distinct syllable final /-m/ within the SJ sound system on the basis of a few examples like these, it seems more likely that forms such...

Association Learning with Own‐ and Other‐race Faces in three‐ and six‐month old infants – A longitudinal study

This longitudinal study assessed 133 Caucasian German infants at 3 and 6 months of age to investigate the influence of own‐race and other‐race faces as visual stimuli on association learning in the visual expectation paradigm (VExP). The study is related to the findings on the other‐race‐effect (ORE) which is said to emerge at 6 months of age. Caucasian faces were used as stimuli of a familiar ethnic category, whereas African faces were used as stimuli of an unfamiliar ethnic category. There was no significant difference between the two stimulus classes in infants' reaction time (RT) to stimulus shifts at 3 months. At 6 months of age, infants' RT decreased significantly in the Caucasian faces condition but not in the African faces condition. These results indicate that the processing of other‐race versus own‐race faces by the age of 6 months, which is also the relevant age for the onset of the ORE, has an important influence on the performance on the VExP. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Psychological factors influencing the evaluation of electric vehicle interior noise

Increasing global awareness of the benefits of electromobility has brought about the need for new concepts in terms of the acoustic design of future vehicle generations. This includes both the creative design process and the development of suitable methods for the subjective evaluation of target sounds. The main difference between e-car sound surveys and those carried out on familiar sound categories is the potential consumer's lack of experience with electric vehicles. Thus, the consumer has no, or very unspecific, expectations in this regard. Several studies have shown that many subjects have to construct their personal frame of reference for evaluation within the listening experiment. However, this is possibly at odds with experience-based expectations relating to sounds of conventional combustion engines. The result is a conflict of objectives between the traditional and the modern, familiarity and strangeness, and not least between driving freedom and ecological awareness. In this context, the authenticity of the sound and the subjective interpretability of the sound information also appear as moderator variables. Moreover, associations with other vehicle categories, for example, streetcars, also influence the perceived sound quality. Within this contribution, these factors will be expounded and their influence on the evaluation of interior noise discussed.

The Neural Correlates of Object Familiarity and Domain Specificity in the Human Visual Cortex: An fMRI Study

Ventral occipito-temporal cortex is known to play a major role in visual object recognition. Still unknown is whether object familiarity and semantic domain are critical factors in its functional organization. Most models assume a functional locus where exemplars of familiar categories are represented: the structural description system. On the assumption that familiarity should modulate the effect of visual noise on form recognition, we attempted to individualize the structural description system by scanning healthy subjects while they looked at familiar (living and nonliving things) and novel 3-D objects, either with increasing or decreasing visual noise. Familiarity modulated the visual noise effect (particularly when familiar items were living things), revealing a substrate for the structural description system in right occipito-temporal cortex. These regions also responded preferentially to living as compared to nonliving items. Overall, these results suggest that living items are particularly reliant on the structural description system.

A neural basis for real-world visual search in human occipitotemporal cortex

Mammals are highly skilled in rapidly detecting objects in cluttered natural environments, a skill necessary for survival. What are the neural mechanisms mediating detection of objects in natural scenes? Here, we use human brain imaging to address the role of top-down preparatory processes in the detection of familiar object categories in real-world environments. Brain activity was measured while participants were preparing to detect highly variable depictions of people or cars in natural scenes that were new to the participants. The preparation to detect objects of the target category, in the absence of visual input, evoked activity patterns in visual cortex that resembled the response to actual exemplars of the target category. Importantly, the selectivity of multivoxel preparatory activity patterns in object-selective cortex (OSC) predicted target detection performance. By contrast, preparatory activity in early visual cortex (V1) was negatively related to search performance. Additional behavioral results suggested that the dissociation between OSC and V1 reflected the use of different search strategies, linking OSC preparatory activity to relatively abstract search preparation and V1 to more specific imagery-like preparation. Finally, whole-brain searchlight analyses revealed that, in addition to OSC, response patterns in medial prefrontal cortex distinguished the target categories based on the search cues alone, suggesting that this region may constitute a top-down source of preparatory activity observed in visual cortex. These results indicate that in naturalistic situations, when the precise visual characteristics of target objects are not known in advance, preparatory activity at higher levels of the visual hierarchy selectively mediates visual search.

Review of field-reversed configurations

This review addresses field-reversed configurations (FRCs), which are compact-toroidal magnetic systems with little or no toroidal field and very high β (ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure). Although enthusiasm for the FRC has primarily been driven by its potential for an attractive fusion reactor, this review focuses on the physics rather than on technological or engineering aspects. Major advances in both theory and experiment have taken place since the previous comprehensive FRC review in 1988. Even so many questions remain. In particular, even though FRC experiments have exhibited remarkable stability, how well this extrapolates to larger systems remains unresolved. The review considers FRCs under familiar topical categories: equilibrium, global stability, self-organization, transport, formation, and sustainment.

An exploratory mindset reduces preference for prototypes and increases preference for novel exemplars

Previous research has shown that prototypes of familiar categories are preferred over novel exemplars of familiar and unfamiliar categories. The present research demonstrates a reversal of this effect by simply inducing an exploratory mindset. Specifically, participants were asked to judge the attractiveness of dot patterns that represented prototypes of familiar categories, exemplars of familiar categories, or exemplars of novel categories. An exploratory mindset was manipulated by asking participants to imagine the stimuli as stars (versus as peas). Results show that participants in the exploration condition preferred exemplars of novel categories (thereby reversing the classical prototypicality effect), whereas participants in the control condition preferred prototypes. The role of mindsets and familiarity in attractiveness ratings is discussed.

Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era , and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, and: Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present Richard L. Stein (bio) Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, by Lara Baker Whelan; pp. xi + 177. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, £80.00, $125.00. Semi-Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present, by Todd Kuchta; pp. viii + 264. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010, $59.50, $24.50 paper, £53.50, £21.95 paper. For over half a century, led by such scholars as A. J. Dyos, British urban history has enlarged its scope to include British suburban history, particularly by charting—to borrow from the title of Donald J. Olsen's classic study—the "Growth of Victorian London" in developments around the shifting margins of the expanding city. The questions posed by this tradition remain vital: how much of what we think we know about Victorian London belongs to the city itself? Precisely what was that city, and where was it? How should its historical boundaries be drawn? What evidence provides the best measure of its changing character or the changing characters with whom it was identified? How much of its legacy survives? Both books under review address such questions through parallel if distinct approaches. In Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, Lara Baker Whelan describes what might be termed the psychic geography of London suburbanization in a historically grounded literary survey that gives equal weight to the facts and fantasies of the city's late-nineteenth-century expansion. Todd Kuchta's Semi-Detached Empire examines the same phenomena over a longer period and with a wider lens, remapping suburbanization in relation to the dialogue of city and country and, especially, the history of British colonization, an imperial growth fundamentally (if paradoxically) linked with suburban growth at home. The main outlines of Whelan's story are familiar: incomes rose, people moved, villages developed into something less picturesque. As the size and idea of London shifted, material places gave rise to hopes and fears. Escape from the inner city, once the cherished dream of a rising middle class, produced a social return of the repressed when undesirables joined the march of bricks and mortar out of town. Suburban dreams turned to nightmares; once-placid communities like Lambeth or Chelsea provided backdrops for the gothic drama of sensation novels. By the beginning of the twentieth century the urban exodus reversed as cultural elites like the Bloomsbury Group returned to inner London. Whelan's penultimate sentence sums this up provocatively: "Could Modernism have existed without the Victorian suburb and all it engendered?" (158). As that sentence suggests, this is primarily a literary study, focusing on fiction by numerous well- and lesser-known writers, from Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. One of its strengths is to treat their work (and that of others) as suburb-specific. Rather than invoke such familiar categories as "Dickens on railway construction," Whelan considers works in relation to their locales, which in turn are placed on a detailed map of social mobility. Hence, Dombey and Son (1846-48) is read in relation to developments in and around Camden Town, episodes like Florence's encounter with Good Mrs. Brown in the context of Victorian anxieties about a migrating "residuum" that found its way into respectable suburbs (45). As Whelan's use of the term "anxieties" in her title suggests, these concerns are grounded less in demographic realities than cultural fantasies, generated (in a notable [End Page 745] example) by the "most titillating sketches" in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62) (49), among other sources. Whelan's emphasis on fiction reveals how such fantasies were formed and circulated; her detailed account of class measures the distance between fantasy and fact. If Whelan is at her best evoking material environments, she is less successful in distinguishing such subgenres as suburban gothic, suburban mysteries (which are, she acknowledges, a category of the former), or (in the least convincing section) suburban sublime. The treatments of fictional plots and settings...

Law and the Production of Superfluity

This article considers the concept of superfluity and its pertinence to the study of law. While not a familiar theoretical category, superfluity directs attention to a range of important contemporary problems. The focus here is on the systematic production of superfluous people. Reference is made to writing by Hannah Arendt, for whom the production of superfluous people was central both to totalitarianism and, more generally, to capitalist imperialism. Reference is also made to recent writing by Zygmunt Bauman and Loïc Wacquant, who have addressed ‘human waste’ and ‘advanced marginality’ in the context of neoliberal restructuring. The article raises the question of how legal processes and structures, and especially those associated with international or transnational law, may contribute to the production of superfluity, as described by these authors. It appears that we know relatively little on this subject, and that more work is needed. At the end of the article, the possibility is evoked of an alternative, reclaimed or ‘real’ superfluity, understood as the ‘in-the-wayness’ of those struggling to transform the conditions in which human superfluity is produced and reproduced.

Orthodox Perspectives on Peace, War and Violence

Orthodox Perspectives on Peace, War and Violence

Der Ich-Effekt des Geldes: Zur Geschichte einer Legitimationsfigur , and: Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination 1770–1850 , and: “Material Delight and the Joy of Living”: Cultural Consumption in the Age of Enlightenment in Germany (review)

Fritz Breithaupt, Der Ich-Effekt des Geldes: Zur Geschichte einer Legitimationsfigur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008. 318 pp. RichardT Gray, Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination 1770-1850. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2008. 476 pp. Michael North, Material Delight and the Joy of Living: Cultural Consumption in the Age of Enlightenment in Germany. Trans. Pamela Selwyn. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. 273 pp. In 1999, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen published an anthology of essays entitled The New Economic Criticism.1 The volume marked the first attempt to name a body of scholarship that had been taking shape over the course of roughly the previous two decades, a collection of studies which, though diverse, was nonetheless unified by a focus on the interpenetration of literary, cultural, and economic spheres. While sometimes indebted to the insights of (especially Western) Marxism, scholars working in this vein were less interested in traditionally Marxist categories like class than in the rhetorical and conceptual overlap between these spheres as well as in the ways in which they have co-determined one another historically. Their analyses reflected the renewed focus on context that characterized New Historicism, and, like New Historicism itself, they would have been unthinkable without Foucault, whose notions of episteme and discourse provided a new model for thinking about the perceptual and conceptual unity of historical periods. But it would be a mistake to reduce the New Economic Criticism to a mere variant of New Historicism. On the contrary, as Catherine Gallagher has pointed out in the introduction to her own contribution to the genre, these new economic approaches to culture emerged out of a constellation of diverse theoretical interests dating back to the 1970s.2 One line of descent can be traced back to poststructuralism, which revealed how meaning is created according to an economic logic of linguistic substitution. In addition, these approaches have been shaped by some of the more sophisticated forms of Marxist ideological critique, which challenged the notion that authors and intellectuals, no matter how critical, could ever really stand outside of the dominant ideologies of their day. A final source of inspiration was the work undertaken in the sociology of literature, both in the form of historical analyses of the economics of authorship and in the more theoretically innovative work of Bordieu, who showed how an economic logic defines even those fields of cultural production and reception that had previously been cast in opposition to the economy. When Woodmansee and Osteen's volume appeared, the idea of a New Economic Criticism was arguably even less well-known in German Studies circles than among the scholars of British and French culture who contributed the bulk of the essays to their collection. This is not to say that scholars of German literature and culture had no interest in economic questions. With a few notable exceptions, however, such as Martha Woodmansee's own The Author, Art and the Market (1994), Jochen Horisch's Kopf oder Zahl (1996), or Daniel Purdy's The Tyranny of Elegance (1998), those who worked on economic topics tended to stake out claims within a terrain defined by the familiar Marxist categories of class and alienation. Much has changed in the past ten years, and one can now identify a growing group of German studies scholars interested in the dialogue between culture and economics. Moreover, the transformative years between 1750 and 1850, famously designated by Koselleck as the Sattelzeit, have served as a focal point for many of these analyses. The three volumes under consideration here represent some of the most exciting work currently being done in this area.3To be sure, they differ fairly dramatically in scope and method. Gray presents a series of fine-grained textual analyses that map the interface between literary and political-economic discourse in the decades between 1770 and 1850. …

Maternal back/grounds inChildren of MenNotes toward an Arendtian biopolitics

This article intervenes in readings of Cuaron's Children of Men that privilege the psychic and political trajectory of the film's anti-hero, Theo Faron. Inspired by comments about the importance of the cinematic background and the biopolitical order it represents, I engage the material, corporeal dimensions of in/fertility in the film and take the 'race/reproduction bind' (Weinbaum) as central to biopolitical analysis. I interpret the miraculously pregnant illegal immigrant, Kee, in relation to two intersecting strands of fiction and theory: a lineage of dystopian speculative fiction on the one hand, and transatlantic studies on the other. Through a sustained consideration of 'grounds' and 'backgrounds' as they appear in both strands of work, I generate a more elastic conception of 'background'. Such an analysis opens up new angles of approach for biopolitical theorising by foregrounding two figures - the reproductive female and the child - that embody generativity in excess of the now familiar biopolitical category of Homo sacer, or bare life (Agamben). I conclude by showing how the film resonates with Hannah Arendt's enigmatic principle of natality as a possible point of departure for biopolitical analysis. I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future. - M argaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale , 84 In this sense, in its need for beginners that it may be begun anew, the world is always a desert. - H annah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203 In his response to the film adaptation of P.D. James's story of a childless and dystopian Britain, Slavoj Žižek observes that Children of Men (Cuaron US/UK 2006) is a film in which 'the background persists' ('Clash'). Zahid Chaudhary, too, argues that the film's 'structure of visibility (is one) in which the back- ground of the frame, rather than the putative object of cinematic focus, carries the weight of signification' (80). Both thinkers are interested in how the film's background coheres into a violent, uncannily familiar biopolitical order - one in which camps and cages are symptoms of national lockdown and the words 'homeland security' justify the forcible confinement of refugees. My aim here is to extend critical discussion of Children's cinematic background by focusing on

On Bazaars and Battlefields: Recent Scholarship on Mediterranean Cultural Contacts

For the past century, the field of Mediterranean Studies has been primarily dominated by two paradigms that appear on the surface, at least, to be mutually exclusive: the bifurcated Mediterranean of the battlefield, and the linked Mediterranean suggested by the region’s many bazaars and other places of encounter and exchange. But when the dotted lines separating the color-coded civilizations inscribed on maps of the Mediterranean are erased, when we begin to question and to breach its boundaries, new patterns of interaction materialize which fundamentally call into question many cherished assumptions about the sea, and about familiar and time-worn categories such as east and west, Ottoman and European, Muslim and Christian. In their place we are able to perceive a more nuanced and complex world of contention, as well as commerce, connection and even coexistence.

Sensemaking, metaphors and performance evaluation

Summary This paper analyzes the linkages between sensemaking, metaphors and performance evaluation in an organizational setting. Drawing on a study of how university students prepared for examinations, it argues that one way people make sense of being evaluated is through metaphors that conventionalize reality and thus contribute to the maintenance of continuity in everyday social action. This is because metaphorical understandings assist people's effort to assign events and situations to familiar categories and thereby turn the ‘unusual’ into ‘business as usual’. Moreover, metaphors are cognitive and more broadly power-laden social resources, which individuals and groups employ in determining how to make sense of and deal with potentially unsettling events such as performance evaluations.