Metaphorical Space Research Articles

Metaphorical Space of Discourse: Structure, Algorithm and Modeling

Metaphoric space of discourse is understood as a part of the semantic space of discourse formed on the complex relationships between the semantic spaces of the source-area and the target-area as well as within these areas in the whole set of discourse metaphors. The structure, algorithm and approaches to modeling the metaphorical space of discourse and its model are demonstrated on the example of vocal-pedagogical discourse.

Sailing Away on the SS Academe: A Discussion of Current Graduate Student Experience in Leisure

Navigating the roles and responsibilities of graduate work is a complex, and often confusing business of workflows, labor (emotional and physical), and moving in several different directions. As graduate students, we find solace and compassion in the words and (mostly) shared experiences of our colleagues, and challenges in the desires, requirements, and “this is your life now” statements of our supervisors and faculty mentors. To be a trainee in the academic context of leisure studies is to make an already complex work of personal development and intellectual labor even more complicated. Building on personal experience and the collective experiences of my colleagues, this paper will discuss PhD student experiences in leisure, and the deep influences that structural and social changes are having on those same students. It will explore our perceptions of post-PhD horizons, the challenges of student lives, and the complexities of being both a professional and a novice at the same time. As graduate students, we navigate these issues using the tools at our disposal (both traditional and modern), all-the-while wondering if we are doing any of it the “right” way. Enlisting the attractive metaphorical spaces of sailing and the crew of a tall ship, this paper explores the academic seas as a trainee on the SS Academe.

Places of possibility: youth research as creative liberatory praxis

ABSTRACT This work builds upon and extends critical youth studies scholarship concerned with strategies for engaging with young people as active change agents with arts-based research to advance theory and practice for democratic and emancipatory research with young people. In this paper, we share a collaborative self-study where we critically reflected upon our distinct experiences doing arts-based participatory youth research. We applied a critical analysis to our pedagogical and research practices in a systematic manner to garner insights, strategies, and tools that can enhance and improve them. We conceive of ‘places of possibility’ as literal and metaphorical spaces where young people are afforded the tools and resources necessary to imagine alternative realities, identities, and systems than what currently exists, primarily through art and creative practices (Goessling, K. P. 2017. “Youth Learning to be Activists: Constructing ‘Places of Possibility’ Together.” Critical Questions in Education 8 (4): 418–437. doi:17/10/goesslingfinal.pdf). We examined our art and creative practices for generating pedagogical places of possibility at three intersections: (1) creative practices as pedagogy, (2) moments of encounter, and (3) thick participation. Our findings provide strategies and tools for designing transformative research spaces with young people that are humanizing and liberatory places of learning and knowledge production.

María Zambrano y Fernando Pessoa: I know not what tomorrow will bring

Proponemos un diálogo entre La tumba de Antígona, de María Zambrano, y El marinero, de Fernando Pessoa. Los dos textos, concebidos como piezas teatrales, se desarrollan en las horas que preceden al amanecer. Metafóricamente, en un espacio entre la vida y la muerte, entre los sueños y la conciencia despierta. A pesar de la distancia de su escritura, la proximidad tonal de ambas obras permite aproximarse a ellas como si fueran dos movimientos de una misma composición: un réquiem a la memoria.

張愛玲소설 속의 ‘제3공간’의 의미

Literature is art which is performed in fictional time-space. Therefore, it must be related to the life of the writer. Every work of writers represents their own understanding and perception of the space. For example, we can find Zhang Ailing’s spacial narratives in the works like The First Incense Burnt, The Golden Cangue , Love in a Fallen City and Written on Water . Zhang Ailing uses her own spacial experience as a medium leading the narrative of her works. Furthermore, she tries to highlight the image of space by breaking the tradition of old novel’s linear narrative. At this point Zhang Ailing’s works are different from old chinese novels which have linear narrative, and they are also different from western novel which focused on the charaters. Her works come from her own distictive view of space which is related with personal and historical experience. Zhang Ailing creates the third-space surpassing traditional dichotomous awareness of space, and the thrid-space works as a flexible stratergy, also as a metaphor of space. ‘Bleakness’ is a significant aesthetic feature of Zhang Ailing’s works. Zhang Ailing has profound insight to women, and it intensifies her own spacial awarness, espcially feminine space. As a result, We can say that Zang Ailing’s works are deeply seeking the spirit space of urban women, and infusing bleakness in her fictions. Since Zang Ailing’s first novel was published, there were many studies about her works. However, few analyzed them as spacial narrative. This article would analyze ‘the third space’ as a distinctive spacial awarness of Zhang Ailing through examinating images of city and house as spacially and narratively.

Evincing the soul of a city

ABSTRACT Background: This article outlines how poetry is able to configure the soul of a cityscape through the modes of personification and metaphors of public space. Purpose: It argues that these modes are so intertwined in reality that it is possible to gather a sense of a city’s soul through experiential, rhythmical, temporal and transmigratory images of cityscape. Design: The article applies a typology of metaphors and personification as the basis for the analysis of the soul’s presence in a city Main argument and findings: The results of the study show that named and unnamed literal, figurative and personified terms help evince the transmigration of the city’s soul. Originality and value: An implication arising from this finding is that figurative language offers considerable transfers of meaning from one epistemic element to another to enable a nuanced understanding of cityscapes. There appears an unassailable case for the union of cities and poetry as part of our scholarly studies on spiritual literacy.

Contingent Claims

Technocapitalism acts through micro-performative mechanisms which escape human cognition and sense perception but at the same time influence individual behaviour and social conduct. Automated finance and corporate surveillance are both leveraged by proprietary tools operating in the invisible realm of microseconds. While its immediate agency colonizes the future at present, it escapes our phenomenological scope. In fact, technocapitalism operates on a new level of exercising power by shifting its language from representative to performative speech. Hence, data-driven performativity has very material consequences on our real biological and social lives – we are losing our senses in more than one way. How can we move and see through the maze of finance and other data-driven performativity? This essay argues that the performative arts are well situated to create participative situations and alliances that allow for embodied awareness to reveal and resist these infrastructures. However, such art needs to translate technocapitalism beyond cognition, speech and rationality. And such counter-performative aesthetics are to be situated in the field of consequences and take performance outside the metaphoric spaces of the (live) arts. The essay therefore proposes a new reading of the term ‘resolution’ and its semantic field – ranging from perception and visualization to knowledge production and (joint) decision making – to counter the non-transparency of black box exploitation. But there is an urgency to go a step further and transgress the realm of critique and representation towards performative engagements in insurrection if we want to claim an agency in which all the senses of resolution come to bear. Activating the potential of resolution as an alternative to the rather passive notion of transparency calls for ‘renegade activism’ as a strategy of resistance that makes the black box speak from inside.

A Siren in Babylon: the spatiality and architectures of Myra/Myron

ABSTRACT Myron (1974) – sequel to Myra Breckinridge (1968), the science fiction novel where Myra returns to embody Myron, after two clinical sex changes – narrates the oscillation from being male to female to male. In the story, Myron is married to Mary-Ann and living in the San Fernando Valley. Yet one night in 1973, Myra pushes Myron through the television screen while watching Siren of Babylon, transporting both not only to the production set of the movie but also to 1948. The dislocation of space and time forces Myra and Myron to live as one – as Myra/Myron, in pugnacious efforts to outline their territories. To the same extent that the female aims to reconstruct herself as a beautiful temptress who lives in a motel with tacky wooden cabins, the male strives to epitomise the prejudiced American macho who dwells in a pink-stucco Spanish-style building. Through the analysis of the metaphors of space and architecture in Myron, this paper examines the spatiality and attendant practices of two sexualities fighting to command one body. In affinity with Difference and Repetition (1968) by Gilles Deleuze, the interpretation focuses on how the perfected iteration of traditional gender roles entails particular modes of interaction with the environment.

Spatial Interpretations of Recorded Music Sound

The aim of this study is a multi-vector study of the concept of “space” in the context of the interpretation of the recorded musical sound.Research methodology. Methods of interdisciplinary analysis of scientific literature on the issues of art, musicology and sound production have been applied.Results. The sound space contributes to the formation of an interesting sound that complements the song, increases its sense-content load, and creates an appropriate atmosphere. In various models of sound space, the technical aspects created during the recording of a musical work (regulated by panning, equalizers, microphone receptions, reverb, etc.) contribute to the correlation of the recorded space with the metaphorical spaces present in the musical work.Novelty. The analysis of modern scientific approaches to the definition and functioning of the concept of “space” in the context of the interpretation of recorded music sound based on musicological research A. Moore, W. Moylan, A. Rustamov, L. Camilleri, E. Kraugerud, S. Zagorski-Thomas, R. Brоvig-Hanssen and A. Danielsen. Existing concepts of space in stereo recordings and the main functions of sound space are considered and their influence in the process of creating music space by a sound director (the formation of a high aesthetic level, correspondence of genre of a musical work, realism). The relationship between actual (or virtual) and metaphorical sound recording space is analyzed.The practical significance. Information which is given in this article can become useful for the Ukrainian experts and people on the ground of sound directing, musicology, in the context of involving it to educational and scientific appeal.

Visionary Metaphors: Sight, Sickness, and Space in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Julian of Norwich’s Showings

Although Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Julian of Norwich’s Showings are associated with different visionary traditions of the Middle Ages, the shared metaphors of sight, sickness, and space in these works suggest that they in fact may be read within the same textual community. Using the vision form, Boethius and Julian demonstrate how personal transformation and spiritual illumination depend upon spaces of seemingly restrictive confinement. These authors similarly stress the idea of vision as a metaphor for spiritual insight and sickness as the opportunity for recuperation, as they pluralize the meaning of their physical cells. The attention to spatial orientation and physical circumstance emphasizes the cataphatic articulation of both authors’ visionary experiences and undermines traditional Augustinian attitudes toward the division of body and soul.

ВИЗУАЛИЗАЦИЯ ПРОГРАММНОГО ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ НА БАЗЕ СРЕДСТВ ВИРТУАЛЬНОЙ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ ГЕОПРОСТРАНСТВЕННЫХ ДАННЫХ. ОБЗОР И ПЕРСПЕКТИВЫ РАЗРАБОТКИ

Актуальность. В условиях глобальной цифровизации, когда становятся актуальными такие проекты, как цифровая земля, компьютерная визуализация является важным элементом компьютерного моделирования как в научных исследованиях, так и в технике, в частности, в областях геоинформатики, природо- и недропользования, исследования георесурсов. Также компьютерная визуализация необходима при представлении «больших данных», например, накопленных в результате геологических исследований больших пространств. Компьютерная визуализация как самостоятельная дисциплина развивается уже более тридцати лет. В настоящее время в компьютерной визуализации активно используются средства виртуальной реальности, которые и оперируют геопространственными данными. Виртуальная реальность может использоваться при представлении данных о Земле. Возможно создание трёхмерных отображений графических объектов, представляющих элементы ландшафта. Одной из подобластей компьютерной визуализации является визуализация программного обеспечения (Software Visualization). Визуализация программного обеспечения необходима при представлении сложных программных комплексов, связанных с проектированием и разработкой в различных областях техники, включая энергоэффективные технологии. Объекты. Работа посвящена исследованиям и разработкам в области визуализации программного обеспечения на базе виртуальной реальности. Эти исследования могут применяться в целом ряде областей, связанных с геоинформатикой, а также в области исследования георесурсов. Методы: методы теории компьютерной визуализации, а именно элементы теории метафоры визуализации. Цель: поиск подходов, позволяющих эффективно использовать виртуальную реальность для решения сложных проблем, встающих перед специалистами в области программного обеспечения, связанного с большими объёмами сложно структурированных данных, в том числе больших геопространственных данных. Результаты. Проведен обзор развития визуализации программного обеспечения и описаны проекты в данном направлении, разработанные за последние десятилетия. Приводятся разработанные авторами проекты систем визуального программирования и визуализации программного обеспечения на базе виртуальной реальности с использованием метафор космического пространства и расширенной метафоры города. Рассматриваются психологические аспекты человеческого фактора в разработке систем визуализации программного обеспечения с использованием виртуальной реальности, включая использование теории деятельности. Возникает проблема описания деятельности программиста в качестве пользователя систем визуализации программного обеспечения. Разработка программного обеспечения для реальных технических задач, например для нужд инженерной геологии или прогнозирования георесурсов, требует специализации, а то и персонализации визуальных систем. В результате проведенного анализа можно заключить, что мы находимся на первых этапах важных исследований.

Talking about ‘Fairness’ in Football and Politics: The Case of Navad

ABSTRACT We argue that sport in general, and association football in particular, are activities that invite spectators and players alike to talk about them. Using a Wittgensteinian approach, we argued more precisely that football, like any sport, may be understood as a form of life, and as such that it enables speakers to talk about it in quite specific ways, not least in the manner in which normative terms, such as fairness and bias, are used. Football thereby creates a metaphorical space, we suggest, in which there is a freedom to explore and play with language, and in particular normative language, even if that language-use is repressed in the wider political society. Using the example of the Iranian television programme Navad as a case study, we explore the ways in which talk about fairness in the context of football can develop and sustain a competence in the use of political and moral language-use even when that competence is under-threat elsewhere.

Types of linguistic means of influence in the election programs of candidates for the post of the President of Ukraine: on the material of the 2019 elections

The article analyzes the types of linguistic means of influence in the election programs of candidates for the post of President of Ukraine in 2019, used to establish or retain power and manipulate public consciousness and voter behavior. The following types of linguistic means of influence are distinguished: evaluative vocabulary, phraseological units, ideological clichés, metaphors, precedent phenomena, paraphrases, repetitions, gradation, rhetorical questions. It has been proven that evaluative vocabulary occupies a leading place among linguistic means of influence, creates a positive or negative assessment of an event or person. They attract attention and accurately express an emotionally expressive thought phraseological units, of which they have been modified. Ideological clichés are a means of stereotyping the voter's thinking. The emotionality of the presentation is greatly enhanced by the political metaphor. In the election programs of 2019, the following types of metaphors are recorded: a metaphor of illness, a metaphor of collapse, a metaphor of a prison, a metaphor of space, a metaphor of welfare. Indirect names in the programs turned out to be solitary, descriptive names – periphrases, as well as precedent phenomena. Repetition is a useful means of persuading and instilling ideas in voters, used to highlight the main thesis of the program, the depiction of problems that threaten voters. The use of gradation helps the politician to highlight the complexity of the existing problem and convey to the electorate that only this politician can solve it. A rhetorical question is another means of activating voters' attention, the main function of which is to induce voters to think and search for an answer to the question posed. Among the graphic means, the abnormal use of a capital letter to underline the most important lexeme (lexemes) and the use of quotation marks to change the nature of the assessment were recorded. A characteristic feature of the linguistic content of election programs is the layering of several different types of linguistic means, which has an expressive manipulative effect, creates the desired impression, evokes appropriate thoughts and encourages voting.

Moritz's Veil: Observation, the Rupture of Individuality, and Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde

Moritz's Veil:Observation, the Rupture of Individuality, and Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde Richard B. Apgar The late eighteenth century was an era of observation. Whether through the physical structure of the school, emerging practices of scientific observation, or a closer examination of statistics and data, the era's mission was to uncover and unlock the hidden workings of the world. As many have noted, Enlightenment projects were frequently driven by a "totalizing imperative" that attempted to map, locate, and fix subjects in grand systems.1 For example, statistical observation could monitor the state of the economy, the close study of a plant could categorize it within the Linnaean system, ethnological observation generated examples of human diversity, and measurements taken on opposite sides of the globe proved theories about the solar system. Information and data from these observations demanded new methods of presentation and re-presentation. New tables, charts, maps, graphs, and publications were created to convey, preserve, and reproduce the results of observations. Institutions were reorganized as existing systems for managing and locating materials became overwhelmed. As Elliott Schreiber argues in The Topography of Modernity, Karl Philipp Moritz is one of the "keenest observers and theorists" of institutional spaces; his use of Spielraum, a fundamental concept that denotes "latitude or scope," introduces dynamic reconfiguration and constant renewal as a feature of emergent eighteenth-century institutions (Schreiber 5). As dynamic spaces, these institutions are continually produced through crises motivated by the "very impossibility of ever representing absolute totality" (Schreiber 157). In this article, I consider this impossibility within Moritz's writing on the individual. In exploring the "Erinnerungen aus den frühesten Jahren der Kindheit" (memories from the earliest years of childhood), Moritz seeks to discover "die allerersten Eindrücke" (the very first impressions) that form the foundation of all successive memories.2 At the launch of Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde in 1782, Moritz proposes that recounting earliest childhood memories "so getreu wie möglich" (as faithfully as possible) would reveal "die Geschichte seiner Gedanken" (the history of one's thoughts).3 Like Schreiber's description of modern institutions, the modern individual for Moritz is an "entity to be constructed."4 In Moritz's writing on the self, he seeks the "inscrutable, yet [End Page 47] irresistible" origins of the individual hidden by the "ultimate blind spot of self-observation."5 Engaging a memory, unlike reflections made in the moment, requires reading a "Bild, welches sie in der Seele zurückließ" ("Vorschlag" 494; image, which it left behind in the soul). Juxtaposing these images, as Moritz writes the "Nebeneinanderstellung des Successiven," produces the history of each individual ("Vorschlag" 494). As a series of successive images produced by memories, from the start, the individual for Moritz emerges from the interplay between memory and medium. At the same time, these images remain obscured by the veil of memory, and for the individual observer they linger, tantalizingly present yet inaccessible. Through the Magazin, Moritz seeks to navigate this blind spot of observation by collecting multiple accounts as case studies for further evaluation in future issues.6 Just as the individual is the product of the "juxtaposition of successive" images, the Magazin is the "Resultat von allen neben einander gestellten Bemerkungen" ("Vorschlag" 494; result of all of the juxtaposed observations). As metaphorical space for collecting these accounts, the Magazin subjects these memories to further mediation. The collective form of evaluation the Magazin models echoes the notion of second-order observation proposed by Niklas Luhmann; as such, the observations collected in the Magazin create a separation that leads to the dismissal of "the world as unity (wholeness, totality) altogether."7 Tracing the dismissal of wholeness or totality to Moritz's writing challenges depictions of the Enlightenment as pursuing an all-encompassing order. The concept of the individual that Moritz ponders in his writings on childhood memories affirms Enlightenment as a human attempt to create patterns of orientation. By introducing memories as inherently mediated and as constituting the distinction between the adult self and the child self, Moritz distinguishes between the observing self and the self being observed. In his comments on self-observation, Moritz presciently anticipates the critiques Luhmann makes of Habermas two centuries later. As...

Big City as a 'Voice' and 'Image' (on Materials of the City Dnipro)

The article explores how the basic approaches in socio-humanitarian knowledge about city studies have changed. More specifically, there are some changes in the system of metaphors, which serve as a basis for studying the city space. A gradual shift from “real” space metaphors domination to the constructed dimensions is the main tendency. “Imaginary” and “symbolic” are now the core elements of the urbanistic studies. Therefore, the issue of symbolization of such places is becoming more interesting than the studies of the city topography and real objects or groups that constitute interconnected territorial units. The paper presents the results of researching the images of “creative city” as perceived by the student youth of Dnipro. The author of the article defines the differences between the above-mentioned images and the reality of Dnipro. There are several explanations of such differences. On the one hand, the youth notices the elements of the objects of the city space that fit into their ideology of creativity (some of the places-symbols, as co-workings, are important because of mere fact of their existence). On the other hand, during the process of one’s self-realization, they can face practical problems, and symbolization becomes less important. Since there are also some changes in symbolization of the city space (from changes in the holistic descriptions of the city to the dynamics of the topographic nomination system), the evolution of the generalized image of the city, which is incorporated into the citizens’ consciousness, becomes an interesting issue. The official discourse that is available for the citizens due to historical literature becomes one of the competitive projects. The article discusses the dynamics of the symbolization of the history of Katerynoslav-Dnipropetrovsk-Dnipro in traditional, soviet, and post-soviet projects. The author of the paper demonstrates the logic of changes in the systems of events and characters, which help to present the history of the city to the locals within each of the projects.

FEATURES OF THE BOOK GRAPHICS OF NIKOLAI STOROZHENKO OF THE 1958–1970S

The article considers specific features of the book graphic arts of Mykola Storozhenko of the 1958– 1970s, and also investigates and analyzes the stylistic and compositional features of individual works in the context of evolution of his own artist’s style. At the current time, the subject of the book graphic arts of Mykola Storozhenko remains understudied in Ukrainian art, and the problem of the artist’s creativity in the period of the 1958–1970s has not been practically investigated. Mykola Storozhenko’s book graphic arts, like his monumental works, make a significant contribution to Ukrainian art, and therefore require deep and well-grounded study. By using the method of comparative, formalistic and compositional analysis of the works of Mykola Storozhenko’s book graphic arts of the 1958–1970s, the article reveals the approach of the artist to the form and sculpturesque means of visual and graphic arts as the factors of the experimental space. On the example of illustrative series of works of the certain period it is shown that all means of artistic expression are directed by the artist to create a coherent, emotional and metaphoric space. The issues of visual perception, aesthetic influence and artistic self-sufficiency of each individual illustration were put by the master in a number of priorities, at the level of issue of whole book design.The article emphasizes that Mykola Storozhenko directed the search for new technologies and techniques ofwork in traditional and rarely used graphic arts techniques to create an original, expressive in style of publication, with maximum compliance with the content and contemporary art form.The author considered Mykola Storozhenko’s book graphic arts of the 1958–1970s in the broader art historical context of the stylistic landmarks of his age and issues of his own self-identification.As a result of the study, the author of the article proves that all the means of artistic expression, stylistic and compositional features of each of the stages of Mykola Storozhenko’s creativity in the field of book graphic arts of the 1958–1970s are organic components of the process of evolution of the artist’s own style.All materials of this analytical study are quite important in theoretical and practical application directly in the creative process: to improve the curriculum of composition, as well as an auxiliary methodological material for students of creative specialties and student — art experts.

Dissolving into the sea: cinematic migrants and the problem of agency

ABSTRACT Films about irregular migration to Europe that centre on the Mediterranean sea crossing often unwittingly strengthen the regime of migrant (in)visibility furthered by sensationalist media, which include topoi of shipwrecks, dramatic rescues, and body bags. Such films’ imagery of the Mediterranean as a metaphorical space of transformation into living death, actual death, or paradisiacal life also suggests that the identity of the migrant is indeterminable, zombie-like, even monstrous. Finally, focusing on the sea as central to the migrant journey makes invisible the broader geopolitical context, especially the continuing neocolonial relationship between the global North and the global South. My essay examines the political implications of focusing on migrant bodies in the middle of the sea, especially in sympathetic accounts which portray the Mediterranean as a gothic space where the perished yet ghostly migrants haunt Europe like revenants of its colonial past. Gianfranco Rosi’s acclaimed docudrama Fire at Sea (2016) exemplifies this approach. I analyse it in the context of similar visual representations before briefly contrasting it with Želimir Žilnik’s Logbook Serbistan (2015), which situates migrants in a broader geopolitical context and portrays them as non-idealised people with complex backgrounds, political opinions, and agency.

Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, by Jane Desmarais

Reviewed by: Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais Mary Bowden (bio) Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, by Jane Desmarais; pp. 248. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, £25.00, $40.00. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin noted "the increased size and beauty which we now see in the varieties of the heartsease, rose, pelargonium, dahlia, and other plants, when compared with the older varieties or with their parent-stocks" ([Penguin, 2009], 42). Darwin uses these transformed flowers as evidence for his analogy between artificial and natural selection: their enhanced size and altered appearance indicate the Victorians' ability to modify nature according to human desires. This Victorian emphasis on floral manipulation extended to the cultivation of exotic species in British glasshouses. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class consumers had benefited from new methods of manufacturing glass and cast iron, which made the materials for constructing conservatories more affordable, and from improved technologies for transporting plants, which made plants from distant reaches of Britain's Empire newly accessible. Exotic flora filled British glasshouses. These exotic plants—or "monsters under glass"—were natural objects that were artificially modified and maintained. Jane Desmarais argues in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present that in the late nineteenth century, these hothouse flowers "enter literary language in a highly charged way" (7), offering an important challenge to traditional symbolic associations that "equated flowers with beauty and femininity" (8). Instead, the artificiality of hothouse flowers, and the precarity of their existence, evoked darker associations with exotic invasions, sickness, and rot. Desmarais argues that by the twentieth century, these metaphoric meanings offered an idiom for "comment[ing] on the contradictions and complexities of modern existence" (12). While Desmarais's work offers a brief history of plant cultivation in artificially heated and humidified spaces before 1850—in the first chapter, she tracks the development of hothouse technology from ancient Rome through the "Dark Ages," Renaissance, and eighteenth century—her primary focus in the remainder of the book is the decadent literary and artistic culture of fin-de-siècle Britain and France (17). Desmarais convincingly argues that during this period, the hothouse and the hothouse flower "became key metaphors to describe the experience of living in a rapidly modernizing city-world," as the artificial construction of a cosmopolitan vegetal space paralleled late-nineteenth-century urbanization (7). Desmarais's chapters range broadly across various cultural associations with hothouses and hothouse flowers in this period: she examines the city as hothouse; dandies' flower fetishes; "florientalism," or exoticizing associations with hothouse flowers, particularly through perfume (99); the garden as a paradise or torture site; the "fleur fatale," or the renovation of older associations between women and flowers to encompass dangerous or seemingly degenerate New Women (13); the use of glass, including aquaria and bell jars, "as a metaphor of mental space" (14); and weeds, which she suggests represent fears of primitive invasion. Desmarais's archive of sources is similarly impressive in scope, including the works of writers such as Oscar Wilde and J. K. Huysmans; works of art by artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James Tissot, and Édouard Manet; and cultural texts such as perfume advertisements and illustrations from horticultural magazines. While the book's title and introduction suggest a kind of genealogical examination of the ways in which late-Victorian interactions with hothouse flowers continue to inform our cultural understandings of them today, I found the more contemporary interludes in Desmarais's work—such as a brief reading of Raymond Chandler's 1939 [End Page 516] novel The Big Sleep and its 1946 film adaptation—comparatively underdeveloped, and not wholly integrated into a work mainly concerned with the cultural resonances of these flowers in decadent Britain and France. Desmarais's methodology is panoramic. In the introduction, she likens this book to a "cabinet of curiosities" rather than "an exhaustive study of the metaphors of the hothouse and the hothouse flower" (14). Indeed, I found her work most successful when approached as an assemblage of insights rather...

Developing spirituality – an equal right of every child?

ABSTRACTChildren’s spiritual development is influenced by those with whom they interact and by the world around them. An important context for young children is the kindergarten, which has a high level of responsibility for their (spiritual) education. At kindergarten children encounter people with different religious and spiritual attitudes, which may be fundamental to the development of their own spirituality. Research results regarding how two kindergartens in Austria deal with this diversity and how children address it are summarized. One result of this qualitative ethnographic research project is that, depending on their religion, children have different opportunities to develop their spiritual communication and spirituality based on religious traditions and rituals. Developing kindergartens in line with the metaphor of safe spaces where diversity is recognized and discussed can contribute to the creation of equal opportunities for children’s spiritual development.

Between Centrality and Re-scaled Identity: A New Role for the Chinese State in Shaping China\u2019s Image Abroad

China’s image abroad is not anymore shaped by Party bureaucrats with no knowledge of foreign contexts and languages, nor by ideologically driven old-fashioned officials, but by an increasingly diverse network of multiple actors partnering with new players, adopting new channels of communication and continuously adjusting to local contexts, as well as proposing more and more sophisticated messages about China as a country and as an ancient civilization. This paper is aimed at assessing the activities that Chinese actors have been recently engaging in while presenting the country and spreading its cultural messages abroad, with a particular focus on the role and identity of the Chinese state [for a conceptualization of the identity of the Chinese State, see Brødsgaard (China Int J 16(3):1–17, 2018) and Heilmann (Das politische System der Volksrepublik China. Springer, Heidelberg, 2016; Red swan how unorthodox policy-making facilitated China’s rise. Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2018)]. For instance, by highlighting the adoption of innovative channels in China’s diplomatic practices, it is possible to get an understanding of the new identity of the state in communicating Chinese society and culture abroad. The author provides a theoretical framework to understand the re-scaling of the Chinese state identity, by looking at the specific case of engagement using digital media—in particular the microblogging social network Twitter—by the commercial attaché at the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. With the caveat that the empirical analysis is still preliminary, the author concludes that the role of the Chinese state in sponsoring the country’s image, or conducting “State branding”, abroad, albeit re-scaled, retains its centrality. The contribution of this paper consists in arguing that the identity of the State tends, thus, to take up different features and a more variegated character by playing at the intersection of traditional and non-traditional communication media, by increasingly relying on partnerships with local non-governmental actors, as well as by conquering different dimensions of “space” (in quantum physics, up to 11 dimensions of space (also called spacetime) have been conceived, while in bosonic string theory—a part of quantum physics—space is 26-dimensional. In this article, the understanding of “space” and its multiple declinations draws from conceptualizations proposed by quantum physicists. Spacetime as a concept has been explored by philosophers of science such as Hale (Philos Stud Int J Philos Anal Tradit 53(1):85–102, 1988), Healey (Erkenntnis 42(3):287–316, 1995), and Lam (Philos Sci 74:712–723, 2007). Brown (J Mod Lit 32(3):39–62, 2009), French and Krause (Erkenntnis 59(1):97–124, 2003), and Ney (Noûs 46(3):525–560, 2012) already worked on connections between the concept of spacetime in quantum physics and different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.), namely a virtual space, an emotional space, a metaphorical space, an interactive space, and an informal space. This pragmatic approach does not mean that the state downsizes its role and that we should think the position of NGOs and non-state actors is more relevant, but it, instead, redefines its role and reframes its participation in activities abroad by re-thinking its involvement, occupying different spaces and communicating in a more sophisticated way. The novel contribution of this paper consists in framing a theoretical approach to analyze the Chinese state presence abroad, by linking of the concept of quantum spacetime and its dimensions to that of “state rescaling”.