Parallel Lives Research Articles

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

AbstractThis article explores continuities and discontinuities between two kinds of death in punishment: of death as punishment and of death as the specified detritus of punishment, life without parole (LWOP). It traces the parallel lives and equivalencies between life and death in penal policy and practice in the US, and attendant narratives of harshness/mildness, and compromises and covenants with pasts and futures. The discourse of death that has sustained the survival of the death penalty in the US has found a home in LWOP. It argues that spectacles and memorialisations of injustice, error and pain circumscribed in the judicial and popular discourse of death as different provide spaces for reflection on dignity and cruelty, spaces in which the loss of life and liberty can be grieved, a subversive politics of mourning (Butler 2004) for those whom punishment had deemed dispensable. As the death penalty is exchanged for LWOP, reform strategies need to reimagine and recapture these spaces for grieving, and understanding the death work of LWOP in US penal politics is crucial to this endeavour.

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Exploring YouTube as a Transformative Tool in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” Movement

Living together in multi-ethnic cities: People of migrant background, their interethnic friendships and the neighbourhood

This paper explores the extent to which people of different origins, natives and migrants, come together in everyday life in Europe. Instead of looking at overall ‘perceptions’ and ‘stances’, which are context-dependent and mediated through political-ideological currents and discourses as well as broader patterns of prejudice, we focus on sustained close contacts that suggest meaningful and organic relationships. Since it is most often people of migrant background who are blamed for leading ‘parallel lives’ and ‘not integrating’, we chose to focus on them and their interethnic friendships. Moreover, we seek to understand the relevance and role of the neighbourhood context in the development of those relationships. Despite the expressive fears in public discourses about the supposed negative impact of the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities on social cohesion, our findings indicate that close interethnic relationships are not uncommon in diverse European cities. They further highlight that the neighbourhood context plays an important role in the first years of migrants’ settlement. Relationships in the neighbourhood develop in less formal social settings and are also less demanding in terms of host-country cultural skills on the part of the migrants, thus giving the opportunity to newcomers to develop close interethnic relationships with natives. Finally, the analysis supports the positive role of diversity at the neighbourhood level in the development of interethnic friendships and stresses the importance of the neighbourhood’s socio-spatial characteristics and its location in the wider urban net.

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: meat markets

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: meat markets

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: Meat markets

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: Meat markets

A Study into Knowledge Management and E-Learning in Educational Organizations

In the information age, knowledge is considered the key to success. In the modern world, productivity consists in managers' ability to create new scopes of knowledge and stimulate smart activities. The development of information and communication technology and the exponential increase of information and knowledge about the use of modern communicative and information devices including computer have made it essential for educational institutions and universities which are the cradle of education and knowledge production as well as knowledge and professional workforce of a society. With the introduction of computer to human life in parallel with the spread of the internet, many social concepts and services have changes and been moving toward a radical development as the effects of the developments are manifested in the everyday life more and more. In this respect, knowledge management seems essential in order to generate boundless enthusiasm for moving toward E-learning and organizational capacity improvement. In this paper, the function and necessity of E-learning and knowledge management in organizations are addressed. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s3p248

Istoriografijos teorijai Lietuvoje – du šimtai metų, arba kaip Jjoachimas Lelewelis tapo moderniosios lyginamosios istorijos pionieriumi

In 1815 distinguished Polish historian Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) published in Vilnius his Historyka, marking the origin of the theory of historiography in Lithuania and Poland. This paper, originally presented at the international conference at Vilnius university in November 2015 to celebrate 200-year anniversary of this event, explores the evolution and original features of Lelewel’s views on writ­ing history. Main focus is on the relation between his methodological and substantive work: did Lelewel’s huge time and effort input into methodological reflection did pay off, endowing him with the competitive advantages in the “doing history”? The author argues that Lelewel’s unconventional idea of the essential unity of history and statistics did help him to conceive his pioneering comparison of Poland and Spain in 16–18th centuries. Tabular form of presentation and implicit use of the multilateral multivariate com­parisons can be attributed to Lelewel’s dual institutional role of the professor of universal history and of statistics at Vilnius university in 1822–1824. Lelewel’s unconventional conception of the relation between historical studies and statistics is another expression of this dualism. Another source of Lelewel’s inspiration as comparativist is Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives”.

Parallel lives: A phenomenological study of the lived experience of maladaptive daydreaming

ABSTRACTThis qualitative study describes the lived experience of maladaptive daydreaming (MD), an excessive form of unwanted daydreaming that produces a rewarding experience based on a created fantasy of a parallel reality associated with a profound sense of presence. A total of 21 in-depth interviews with persons who self-identified as struggling with MD were analyzed utilizing a phenomenological approach. Interviewees described how their natural capacity for vivid daydreaming had developed into a time-consuming habit that resulted in serious dysfunction. The phenomenology of MD was typified by complex fantasized mental scenarios that were often laced with emotionally compensatory themes involving competency, social recognition, and support. MD could be activated if several requirements were met. Because social interaction seems to be incompatible with this absorbing mental activity, solitude was necessary. In addition, kinesthetic activity and/or exposure to evocative music also appeared to be essential features. Besides delivering a firsthand description of key characteristics of MD, the study also indicates that MD is associated with dysfunctionality for which participants expressed a substantial need for help.

Parallel Lives on the Plaza

In the last two decades, many city center plazas in the Netherlands have been redeveloped to become more attractive “meeting spaces” and not merely profitable “market places.” This article analyzes the use and experience of Schouwburgplein, an urban plaza in Rotterdam, as meeting space by young Dutch women of Turkish and Moroccan descent. Our analysis reveals a paradoxical interplay between “social comfort” and “social control” in public space. To feel comfortable, the young women avoid interaction with non-befriended young men of immigrant descent and use the plaza in company of friends and family, mostly young females of immigrant descent. However, being among known and unknown youth of Turkish and Moroccan descent on the plaza also implies subjecting oneself to uncomfortable social control. Moreover, the young women of Turkish and Moroccan descent seem occupied with being part of what they consider “their” youth group and some even reveal indifference toward “others” on Schouwburgplein—resulting in “parallel lives” on the plaza.

Parallel lives? The Greek and Turkish dictatorships’ self-transformation stories

ABSTRACTAn unnoticed similarity between the Greek dictatorship of 1967 and the Turkish one of 1980 is the unsuccessful Greek regime's attempt to transform itself as the Turkish one did in 1983. The failure of the “Markezinis experiment” (the Greek regime-led transition) presents an interesting comparison with the Turkish transition of 1983, calling for an accounting of the reasons for the different outcomes of the two regimes’ self-transformation attempts. The article offers a framework for the above, based on the difference in the position of the regimes vis-à-vis that of the army within the political of the two countries before and during the dictatorships, and on the tactics of the actors involved in the transition processes.

‘Alive in the Telling’: Trailblazing Women Lawyers’ Lives, Lived with Law

The title of this chapter is inspired by Kirin Narayan’s book - Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012), who I heard speak at the Australian National University where she was later appointed Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language.1 Kirin engaged us all in her life journey as an anthropologist with verve, passion and energy. Her message was that ‘when words gather together with energy, others places, other people, and other voices stir in parallel life’ (2012: ix). She reminds us that writing can be as powerful as her oral presentation in conveying her drive and spirit and she provides great insights on how we can all seek to be ‘alive in the writing’.

La mirada de Plutarco: significados y funciones de su testimonio visual en las Vidas Paralelas

On the numerous occasions in which Plutarch mentions places, monuments, objects or events in his Parallel Lives, there are few examples in which we are assured that he had seen those personally, either because he states so outright or uses formulaic expressions that indicates his experience, or because we can deduce it from his descriptions and comments.In this paper we study the value of the author’s findings from his own eyewitness testimony. A key aspect is the role of the author’s eye witness testimony in the discussions and in the descriptions of the nature of the characters and its relationship with other elements of thebiography. The eyewitness testimony of Plutarch also has the purpose, highly important in the biographical genre, of recognising the permanent validity of the facts of the past in the present.

Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood by Armin Mattes

Reviewed by: Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood by Armin Mattes Hannah Spahn Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood. By Armin Mattes. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 266. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3804-2.) What may be most striking in a first perusal of this compelling history of the conceptual origins of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–1840) is Armin Mattes’s innovative approach, which can roughly be described as the unlikely but happy marriage between German conceptual history and an updated version of a much older method, one admired by the [End Page 662] eighteenth-century revolutionaries themselves. Following Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), on the one hand, Mattes presents a clear-sighted historical analysis of key political terms of the revolutionary period, including democracy, aristocracy, equality, and nation. And on the other hand, Mattes employs a historiographical tool familiar since the days of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, pairing and comparing two political thinkers from each side of the water (the Atlantic, in Mattes’s case) to shed light on the interdependent, transnational nature of these concepts. The four chapters resulting from this methodological union find instructive connections not only between men directly engaged in dialogue, such as Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and Antoine Destutt de Tracy, but also between thinkers whose conversation depended on the mediation of a third party, as in the case of Friedrich Gentz and John Adams (who read Gentz in John Quincy Adams’s translation), and between James Madison and Immanuel Kant, who were not biographically connected, but in whose cosmopolitan peace plans Mattes identifies parallels reaching down even to stylistic features—such as their respective reflections on governments of “angels” (p. 113). In these chapters, which can be read individually but also build on one another, the intellectual lives of Mattes’s modern Greeks and Romans yield many stimulating insights. Analyzing Paine’s conception of individual equality, for instance, Mattes offers a convincing new explanation for the absence of systematic references to democracy before the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). Mattes’s account of the changing nature of aristocracy in the revolutionary period, to take another example, does not grant Burke his customary place at the center of an emerging modern conservatism, but instead reconstructs a heterogeneous “rational” line of early conservative thought in the writings of John Adams and Kant’s former student and Burke’s translator, Gentz (p. 66). Meanwhile, as Mattes argues in his careful discussion of the shared roots of modern concepts of democracy and nation in Tracy’s and Jefferson’s thought, the reinterpretation of these terms through the lens of the French Revolution generated the “new political language” that became the conceptual groundwork of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (p. 142). Tocqueville’s work, which also provides the title quotation for Mattes’s study, should accordingly be viewed as “an important milestone rather than a beginning…in the development of a modern concept of democracy” (p. 185). The great precision and clarity that characterize the arguments throughout Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The Transatlantic Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood make it quite unlikely that Mattes’s own intellectual homeland, as presented in this book, can fail to attract numerous future citizens. Hannah Spahn University of Potsdam Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Juan Fernández de Heredia y Plutarco. Las Vidas Paralelas

Juan Fernandez de Heredia, Great Master of the Saint John of Jerusalem’s Order, passionate person for grecolatin culture and great humanist promoter, find hollow between his occupations as State man for promoting numerous works, and between these, a translation of the Plutarc’s Parallel Lives, which is recovered in this way for Occident. Two translators took order of such commission: one byzantine translator, Talodiqui, and one aragonese translator, Nicolaus; the latter translate what the byzantine translator had translated in byzantine language. The byzantine version has not arrived to us; yes, nevertheless, the byzantine version. This paper analyses several questions which have to see with the difficulty of a translator function not from the Plutarc’s aragonese text, but a intermediate text that have disappeared. Nevertheless, the aragones translation not ceases to see one linguistic invaluable document for the studious of romanist and aragonese language.

A Life Course Approach to Understanding Neighbourhood Effects

Many theories on so-called neighbourhood effects – effects of the residential context on individual outcomes such as employment, education, and health – implicitly, or explicitly suggest lagged effects, duration effects, or for example, intergenerational effects of neighbourhoods. However, these temporal dimensions of neighbourhood effects receive only limited attention in the empirical literature, largely because of a lack of suitable data. The increasing availability of geo-coded, longitudinal, individual-level data now leads to more research which takes these temporal dimensions and time effects into account. This paper argues that it is time for an overarching framework to better understand the temporal dimension of neighbourhood effects. We propose a conceptual model that uses the life course approach as a framework to integrate the various elements of time in current neighbourhood effects theories. The life course approach emboldens the study of full individual life course biographies over time, taking into consideration multiple parallel life careers (such as education, household, housing, work, and leisure) and their relative importance to individual outcomes. A large advantage of the life course approach to neighbourhood effects is that it does not only allow us to incorporate residential neighbourhoods into individual biographies, but also allows us to study the effects of (and interactions with) other social and spatial contexts on individual outcomes.

The Alter Ego Workshop: A Cognitive Exercise

The Alter Ego Workshop:A Cognitive Exercise Josephine Anstey (bio) 1. Introduction Click for larger view View full resolution We all show and hide different aspects of ourselves to different groups and in different situations. Who pops out to have dinner with friends, to obey our grandmother, greet co-workers at the boss’s funeral, or when we are uncertain and lost in an unfamiliar place? Big, anonymous cities, the World Wide Web, travelling, all give people the opportunity to live parallel lives with completely alternate selves. But most of us squash and suppress whole personalities just so we can go about our daily routines. Physicists working on the Theory of Everything propose seven or eight extra dimensions coiled up within the three or four we know. Can we agree that we have alter egos coiled inside, us? Can we give them some room to come out and play? 2. Making Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution The first step, if you choose to take it, is to make an avatar of your alter ego(s): a material representation of your imprisoned self(ves). a). Gather Materials–a peg doll, cloth, pipe cleaners, wool, crayons. * b). Gather Tools–scissors, glue. c). Gather Yourself–rested, fed. d). Go to: http://www.creamcityreview.com/ io-main The audio file supports a meditative frame of mind allowing your alter ego to flow from your fingers into your avatar without self-censorship. * Other materials can be used, clay, balloons, straw, papier mache, a face drawn on your finger, etc. [End Page 46] 3. Getting to Know Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution When you have finished making your alter ego, spend some time getting to know yourself. Do you have a name? Are you shy, angry, greedy, flamboyant? Are you two years old? Are you omnipotent? Are you pregnant? Talk out loud. Walk about. What are you feeling? How would you act under pressure? How would you act if tempted? How would you act in love? 4. Playing with Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution Studies have shown that of all cognitive-breakout exercises, melodrama best supports the process of inhabiting, and unfolding diverse alter egos. Therefore the next step in this cognitive exercise is a guided exploration that takes the form of a melodrama in three acts. Your alter ego is invited to take part in three improvisations that trace the interrelationships of three characters. Love, compassion, repulsion, depression, and some of their attendant difficulties, are explored as your avatar serially steps into the mind of each character. Working through emotion, and the stories that emotion precipitate, helps us consolidate personality. However, the aim of the exercise is not to form a complete alternate self, but to understand that emotional response and judgment is tied more to context than personality; that self in this erea* is a language-based and very malleable construction. * Erea is a portmanteau word combining era (time) and area (space) [End Page 47] 5. Registering for the Melodrama Click for larger view View full resolution If you choose to take part in the melodrama you will need to register for a partner. Your partner is another Alter Ego Workshop participant, whose avatar will be acting opposite your own in real-time improvisations enabled by video-chat. To prepare for each act, read the short preamble that sets the scene. Online your avatars will be assigned roles and you will be given a short script to start the improvisation process. Then let your avatar unfold the scene. Register here for Alter Ego Workshop partner: http://impcon.org/?page_id=420 Warning: This is not a risk-free enterprise; self-image, identity and self-confidence are at stake, not only your own, but that of your partner. We consider that the avatars are necessary buffers for both of you. Although the complete loss of your normal narrative selves is extremely unlikely, it is a condition that may bring difficult consequences in this erea.* * See the case study The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, William Morrow, 1971 [End Page 48] Josephine Anstey Josephine Anstey’s career has been concept and project...

ARCHIVAL RECORDINGS AS MEDIAL FIGURATIONS IN GÁBOR BÓDY’S AND ANDRÁS JELES’S FILMS

In the theoretical discourse of archival footage a shift can be detected from the paradigm of recontextualization towards rhetorical strategy. In terms of this shift, archival recordings are not merely transparent images representing reality within the body of cinematic discourse, but rather figurations, standing for an alternative modality of representation, creating productive tension in the course of interaction of images. In Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde film art archival footage gets a prominent role. For both Gábor Bódy and András Jeles the archival material displays the confrontation between the private sphere and history. The article examines the role of archival footage mainly in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso (Amerikai anzix, 1975) and András Jeles’s Parallel Lives (Senkiföldje, 1993).

Performing the Unspeakable. Intermedial Events in András Jeles’s Parallel Lives

Abstract Among the various connotations of intermediality one is related to the performative aspect of the term. As Ágnes Pethő (2011, 42) formulates: “Intermediality is seen, more often than not, as something that actively ‘does,’ ‘performs’ something, and not merely ‘is.’” This notion of intermediality implies a dynamic category within which media constellations are in continuous motion, being reconfigured by one another, the cinematic medium becoming a playground of media interactions. András Jeles, Hungarian experimental filmmaker formulates the paradox that a particular medium can best express its own mediality through the “foreign” material of other arts and media. The medial consonances and dissonances transform the cinematic medium into a liminal space where meaning as event can take shape. Jeles’s film entitled Parallel Lives (Senkiföldje, 1993) is aimed at such event-like liminality in several respects: culturally, it turns towards a burdened site of the still unprocessed past of the Hungarian society; thematically, it addresses the topic of the Holocaust; and medially, it proposes to artistically render the unrepresentable. The film appeals to the other arts, incorporating a set of literary, painterly and musical allusions that contrast a culturally aestheticized view of the child in pain with the ultimate, inescapable and incommensurable reality.

Plutarch: Parallel Lives: Cimon and Lucullus, Nicias and Crassus, translation, commentary, interpretive study and edited by Maja Sunčič

Plutarch: Parallel Lives: Cimon and Lucullus, Nicias and Crassus, translation, commentary, interpretive study and edited by Maja Sunčič

Barbarian Comparisons

When comparing two heroes, who both fought barbarians, Plutarch does not draw parallels between Greek and Roman campaigns. Instead, in the four pairs of Parallel Lives studied here (Pyrrh.-Mar., Them.-Cam., Cim.-Luc., Alex.-Caes.), Plutarch broadens the significance of barbarian contact, allowing the barbarian enemy, the external Other, to draw attention to Hellenic traits of freedom, culture, and prudence in his heroes and in their cities, both Greek and Roman. Equally important, this Other serves to uncover traces of the barbarian in those same heroes and cities.