Private Experience Research Articles

Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War by Roger D. Markwick, Euridice Charon Cardona (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War by Roger D. Markwick, Euridice Charon Cardona Tetyana Dzyadevych (bio) Roger D. MarkwickandEuridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). xxiv, 305 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-230-57952-1. This factually rich and superbly researched work is an important contribution to the field of the social history of World War II. The authors present a broad panorama of experiences related to the participation of Soviet women in combat during the war. Major strengths of this work are its analysis of Soviet state policy toward women and its insightful account of their private experiences. It is almost impossible to talk about the book of Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona without mentioning Anna Krylova’s recent contribution to the scholarship on Soviet women and war. 1 The two books have very similar titles, deal with the same themes, and sometimes with the same sources. Krylova was the first to show that the Soviet progressive gender policy of the 1930s created a new generation of Soviet women who were educated in paramilitary schools. This prepared them for participation in combat on equal footing with men. [End Page 441] Krylova shows that Soviet women saw no internal conflict between being a woman and being a soldier. Krylova’s investigation is based on interviews, published diaries, and memoirs of Soviet female veterans. She reconstructs the discourse that these women advanced (or interiorized) to articulate their physical, mental, and intellectual readiness to serve in the Soviet army. This generation of Soviet women, just like men, saw it as their duty to be soldiers and fight on the battlefield. Krylova also points out that in the postwar period the Soviet state tended to exclude women veterans from the dominant narrative of World War II. Krylova’s Soviet Women was in many ways a pioneering study, but it had some important weaknesses, starting with its unclear definition of “Soviet women.” To present their discursive and living reality, Krylova uses sources published during the Soviet era, but she never addressees the issue of state censorship. Krylova’s heroines are mostly educated girls from the urban areas of the European part of Russia, who received their degrees mostly in Moscow and Leningrad, which does not reflect the realities of women’s emancipation in the USSR. It seems that Krylova does not consider women from Soviet Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan as Soviet women. How many of them took part in the war and in what capacities? Did cultural and regional differences matter? While claiming that women joined the army under the influence of progressive Soviet educational policy, Krylova deemphasizes other factors such as patriotism, despair, or a desire to avenge the deaths of those close to them. Krylova also fails to consider women in the partisan forces. Had she included women-partisans as combatants, the geographical and political framework of her study would have been broader. This move would probably require a broader definition of a “Soviet woman.” After all, in almost every Nazi-occupied country in East Central Europe, and especially in the Balkans, partisan movements tended to include women, and these women, as well as men, had no exposure to Soviet education and background. How were they different from “Soviet women”-partisans? Thus, the strongest part of Krylova’s work is her reconstruction of the process of construction and exteriorization of the official Soviet discourse on women in combat. She also contributes to the field of gender studies by showing that femininity and combat are not mutually exclusive. Markwick and Cardona follow in Krylova’s steps not only in terms of publishing their Soviet Women on the Frontline soon after Krylova’s Soviet Women in Combat , but also in terms [End Page 442] of sharing Krylova’s approach to defining Soviet women. Markwick and Cardona do not question their identity – it is a given, and they disregard the complex heterogeneous multiethnic nature of the USSR where different subjects may have demonstrated different approaches to women’s emancipation. Like Krylova, Markwick and Cardona take for granted the existence of the cohort of young, educated, and emancipated...

The Politics of Women's Empowerment: The Transformative Struggles of KAMER (Women''s Center) against Violence

Violence against women continues to prevent them from participating in social, economic, political, and cultural life as active subjects. A shift in gendered power relations is one of the key mechanisms for women to transform a life of violence into a life without violence. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the possibilities of feminist politics based on women's empowerment, and its transformatory potential in women's struggle against violence with a particular focus on a grassroots women's organization, KAMER (Women's Center) from Turkey at two levels: on the level of individual women who are active in women's organizations and on the level of an organization. I will discuss how the individual and collective empowerment strategies of women from KAMER open up a multi-dimensional and transformative space that is productive of lasting changes in women's lives. How do women transform a life full of violence into a violence-free one? What are their empowerment mechanisms? A woman’s organizing around the shared grounds of oppression and subordination as well as violence lead women to question their lives as the first steps of their own empowerment processes. Therefore, they become aware of the political-ness of their private experiences. Becoming aware of one's internalized oppressions along with the experiences of violence plays a crucial role on women’s empowerment and it is a recurrent theme of this study. With the recognition of women’s own powers coming from within and with the implementation of transformatory feminist politics based on women's collective and individual empowerment, it becomes possible to create a new world free of violence.

Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia : Anecdote and Women’s Biographical Histories

Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia:Anecdote and Women’s Biographical Histories April London (bio) The proliferation of anecdotal writing over the course of the eighteenth century offers an interesting pathway to questions of genre adaptation in the period. Lionel Gossman’s argument—that from their European advent, these “highly concentrated miniature narratives” were “closely related to history, and even to a kind of counter history”—identifies anecdote with the most prestigious of contemporary forms.1 But anecdote was also important to other, so-called lesser strands of historiography, and in particular to modes such as biography, reshaped in the decades following the 1750s by a new attention to private experience and personality. Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) appears at this critical juncture. Described by its author as a Plutarchan “Biography” infused with “some Mixture of Romance,” and by modern critics variously as biography, orientalist text, historical fiction, satire, novel, and didactic tale, the work has a categorical indeterminacy ideally suited to exploring the relation between biography’s emergent focus on inwardness and the English tradition of anecdotal writing that stretches from the late seventeenth century to the Romantic period.2 While Cleopatra and Octavia did not exert any observable influence on its successors, Fielding’s inventive adjustments to the anecdotal secret histories she inherited illuminate the spate of early nineteenth-century biographical [End Page 137] histories, particularly those written by women. Comparison of Cleopatra and Octavia with Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina (1804), Elizabeth Benger’s comments on that work in her 1818 Memoirs of the late Mrs. Hamilton, and Lucy Aikin’s reflections on her own Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1819) suggests that by realigning Fielding’s unstable genre mix these later writers articulated a version of anecdotal biographical history that was deemed appropriate for women in ways that political history was not. The emergence of anecdote as a distinct mode following the 1674 translation of Procopius’ Anekdota as The Secret History of the Court of Justinian, combined with its subsequent ubiquity, makes it a particularly useful guide to genre transformation. Initially Whiggish in orientation, English secret histories retailed scurrilous anecdotes about court culture in an effort to expose monarchical abuses of “power, privilege, and prerogative” and thereby make the case for “limited constitutional monarchy.”3 Subsequent Tory polemicists, most notably Delarivier Manley, retained their predecessors’ emphasis on sexual intrigue and on the suspect motivations of private individuals who sought to direct affairs of state to their own benefit. While Isaac D’Israeli’s Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (1816) condemned the nineteenth-century reprinting of these early secret histories, dismissing them as “garbage” that “would have perished in their own merited neglect” had they not been “dragged from their lurking holes,” his contemporaries clearly relished both older and more recent exercises in political defamation.4 D’Israeli himself made extended use of existing anecdotal secret histories when writing his James the First and Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (1828), and Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808) revives the techniques of the romans à clef when she sets her narrative in the period of Henry VI, finding in assumed names and a remote period a cover for her satire on Regency corruption. For many writers before mid-century, including Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, “Anecdotes, or secret History” were very nearly transposable terms.5 But as anecdotal modes proliferated, the initial identification with secret history loosened and new narrative possibilities emerged. Evidence of changes in the representational functions of anecdote can thus be seen not only in the continuing interest in the secret histories that Eve Tavor Bannet denominates “a self-conscious genre of historical, political, and life-writing” reaching from Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Oldmixon, and Henry Brook through to Walter Scott’s nineteenth-century two-volume compilation on the Jacobean court, but also, more generally, in anecdote’s evidential importance to developing [End Page 138] professions, including law and medicine; its late-century authorizing as a rich source of quasi...

Psychological inflexibility mediates the effects of self-efficacy and anxiety sensitivity on worry.

Recent research has found low levels of general self-efficacy (GSE: beliefs about the ability to appropriately handle a wide range of stressors) and high levels of anxiety sensitivity (AS: fear of the negative consequences of experiencing anxiety) to be relevant predictors of pathological worry. This study examined the role of psychological inflexibility (PI: the dominance of private experiences over chosen values and contingencies in guiding action), the central component of the acceptance and commitment therapy model of psychopathology, in the effect of GSE and AS on worry. A total of 132 nonclinical participants completed questionnaires assessing the constructs of interest. Partial correlations and regression analyses showed that both GSE and AS were independent predictors of pathological worry after controlling for each other. However, mediation analyses revealed that psychological inflexibility completely mediated the independent effects of both GSE and AS on pathological worry. Theoretical and treatment implications of the results are discussed.

El turismo accesible en Andalucía. Un producto turístico emergente

Despite the progress in universal accessibility and integration of people with sensory or locomotor disability, much remains to be done, especially in regards to accessible tourism. A growing phenomenon of enormous potential and economic and social opportunities. However, there have been innovative public and private experiences of destinations and facilities for public use and tourist vocation especially focused on this large and diverse group which are interesting to highlight because of their business and social transcendence. Also, it is a new typology or model, accessible tourism, with notable conceptual uncertainties and scantily studied from Geography. Our attention will be focused this time in Andalusia, although its analysis is inseparable from the scales of Spain and Europe.

The saloon and the mission: addiction, conversion, and the politics of redemption in American culture

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, sobriety movements have flourished in America during periods of social and economic crisis. From the boisterous working-class temperance meetings of the 1840s to the quiet beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s, alcoholics have banded together for mutual support. Each time they have developed new ways of telling their stories, and in the process they have shaped how Americans think about addiction, the self, and society. In this book Eoin Cannon illuminates the role that sobriety movements have played in placing notions of personal and societal redemption at the heart of modern American culture. He argues against the dominant scholarly perception that recovery narratives are private and apolitical, showing that in fact the genre's conventions turn private experience to public political purpose. His analysis ranges from neglected social reformer Helen Stuart Campbell's embrace of the gospel rescue missions of postbellum New York City to William James's use of recovery stories to consider the regenerative capabilities of the mind, to writers such as Upton Sinclair and Djuna Barnes, who used this narrative form in much different ways. Cannon argues that rather than isolating recovery from these realms of wider application, the New Deal - era Alcoholics Anonymous refitted the drunkard's conversion as a model of selfhood for the liberal era, allowing for a spiritual redemption story that could accommodate a variety of identities and compulsions. He concludes by considering how contemporary recovery narratives represent both a crisis in liberal democracy and a potential for redemptive social progress.

Functions of Personal Experience and of Expression of Regret

Although learning and preparing for future behavior are well-established functions of regret, social functions have been largely ignored. We suggest a new model of the functions of regret, the Privately Experienced Versus Expressed Regret model, in which private experience and public expression differentially serve these functions. The current research examined this model using both naturalistic and experimental approaches. In Study 1, we coded tweets about regret posted on social media to examine whether this content emphasized social relationships versus learning and preparation. Study 2 experimentally examined the hypothesized social closeness function for expression of regrets. Study 3 further examined how privately experienced and publicly expressed regrets differ on the social closeness and learning and preparatory functions. Studies 4 and 5 confirmed the specific social closeness function rather than global social benefits. This research suggests that the social expression of regret differs from private experience in both form and function.

Music, Sound and Space. Transformations of Public and Private Experience

Book review: Music, Sound and Space. Transformations of Public and Private Experience Edited by Georgina Born, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 358 p.

NOVEMBER 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

NOVEMBER 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

Domesticating Ivoirité: Equating xenophobic nationalism and women’s marginalisation in Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu (2005)

Tanella Boni, an author engaged with African women’s emancipation, has written cautionary essays since the 1990s decrying the xenophobic nature of government-sanctioned ivoirité in the Ivory Coast. Forced into exile owing to the subsequent strife (2000-2010), she wrote Matins de couvre-feu (2005), an allegorical novel in which the woman’s status as a second-class citizen is equated with that of a foreigner in a xenophobic state. This representation plays on the domestic / public space dichotomy, considered by feminist discourse to be a social barrier to women’s equal citizenship. Drawing on Boni’s own ‘feminist’ monograph, Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (2008), this article explores the internalisation of national politics (the public sphere) through the ‘domestication’ of an anonymous female narrator who is placed under house arrest. Thereafter an analysis of Kanga Ba, a character who is a victim of xenophobic nationalism, is used to substantiate the equation of the woman’s social and political marginalisation as being that of the foreigner. The argument concludes that Boni’s representational framework ultimately subverts the very notion of a public / domestic dichotomy through narrative strategies that illustrate the porous nature of both spaces, thus eliding the separation between private and national experiences.

“ Biocracy : Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing”

“Biocracy: Reading Poetic Politics through the Traces of Muriel Rukeyser’s Life-Writing”1 Eric Keenaghan (bio) It is a common narrative: after the Second World War, the United States prized social conformity and cultural assimilation at the expense of individualism and any perceived deviation from mainstream norms. Rather than appreciate the diversity of its constituent parts, the US became a “culture of the whole,” as William Graebner dubs it, and homogeneity dominated the postwar moment (69–100). Muriel Rukeyser, believing that such a climate actually predated the country’s entry into the war, publicly militated against that conformity as early as the 1940s. The predominantly isolationist population’s “repressive codes” created a national homogenization that, as she warned in The Life of Poetry (1949), “strikes deep at our emotional lives”; even “our emotions are supposed to be uniform” (17). Rukeyser’s writing attempts to convey the rich variety of inner lives and the resulting connection that individuals feel with one another. Awareness of others’ inner feeling might spur the imagination, thus inviting readers to participate in an alternative vision of life. Her poetic politics are deeply connected to bio-graphy—that is, to the affective writing or rewriting (graphesis) of life itself (bios). During and after the war, she expanded her poetic enterprise by turning to life-writing projects that explored not just her own emotional life but also the emotional lives of others. Even when Rukeyser wrote about herself, though, her work demanded that readers reconsider what it means to write a life, as well as why it is necessary to [End Page 258] reevaluate the politics attending such projects. To fully understand her turn to biography, then, we must overcome our own precepts about life-writing. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Rukeyser famously asks in her poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” answering with the oft-quoted line: “The world would split open” (Collected 463). Not coincidentally, these words serve as a galvanizing slogan for second-wave feminists despite the fact that Rukeyser “never defined herself as a feminist” (Daniels xiii). Since the New Left’s consciousness-raising politics in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist politics have tended to bridge the personal and the political. Despite deconstructionist and constructivist caveats today, we often still default to viewing self-expression as a transparent translation, or at least an attempted translation, of individual private experience into public, collective politics. At first glance, Rukeyser’s career seems to anticipate such an idea. As she notably theorized decades earlier in The Life of Poetry, poetry exists in a triadic relation, moving in “vectors” between the page, “the artist,” and “the audience, or witness,” to generate a shared “consciousness” (51). Writing assumes someone will be there, even if only eventually, to participate in a “process” of change that begins with such “sharing” (Life of Poetry 53). That exchange, rooted in trust and intimacy between strangers, constitutes a form of politics, as private readings invite reimaginings of public connections. Whatever such passages might suggest, and regardless of her years living in the public eye as an activist-poet, Rukeyser did not espouse the prototypical New Left ethos presuming a seamless relationship between the personal, political, and poetic. She herself was inclined toward what many would regard as reticence, never revealing the full picture of the personal experiences informing her political feeling. No matter how close readers feel to this woman reading her poetry, they cannot avoid the realization that they do not really know her. As her son William recounts it, Rukeyser felt that speaking and writing obliquely, rather than directly, about her experience “sufficed for telling the truth.”2 Readers are responsible for following the threads of those partial, somewhat obfuscated disclosures in her poetry, autobiographical prose, public lectures, essays, and interviews. In a 1964 diary entry, after she suffered a stroke that temporarily impaired her speech, Rukeyser entertained the idea of writing her life-story, perhaps in a more expositive [End Page 259] mode: “Could I write it? An autobiog. book called perhaps EFFORT AT SPEECH?” (Muriel Rukeyser Papers [MRP], 1:1, emphasis original). She began outlining that project, but left only skeletal notes for posterity...

Pregnancy rates comparing fresh versus frozen embryo transfers donor cycles: a private center experience

Pregnancy rates comparing fresh versus frozen embryo transfers donor cycles: a private center experience

Treasuring the gaze: intimate vision in late eighteenth-century eye miniatures

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementos, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one's hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures - and their abrupt disappearance - reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject's gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures - including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures - Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

Experiential avoidance and self‐compassion in chronic pain

AbstractThe present study investigates the role of coping, experiential avoidance, and self‐compassion on psychological distress prediction (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms). A battery of self‐report questionnaires was used to assess coping, experiential avoidance, self‐compassion, and psychological distress in 103 adults with chronic pain from Portuguese primary health care units. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed and showed that experiential avoidance and self‐compassion are the factors that mostly explain psychological distress. Our results suggest that when people with chronic pain are willing to remain in contact with particular private experiences without attempting to control them, they reported less depression, anxiety, and stress. Implications for clinical practice were discussed, suggesting the importance of helping people with chronic pain to increase their willingness to pain rather than avoiding it.

A Relational Frame Theory Account of the Emergence of Sexual Fantasy

Sexual fantasy is common among humans and often serves to facilitate sexual arousal. Although some fantasies may be directly related to a person's past experiences, others may be unrelated to direct history, and these are thus more difficult to explain. Relational frame theory is a comprehensive account of human language and cognition that may assist in understanding the processes involved in the emergence of sexual fantasy. This article presents a primer on relational frame theory, along with examples of how relations between stimuli may influence a person's private experience of sexual fantasy.

Commentary: Performance‐Based Management: On the Rise in the Public Transportation Industry

Public Administration ReviewVolume 73, Issue 4 p. 636-637 ARTICLE Commentary: Performance-Based Management: On the Rise in the Public Transportation Industry Michael P. Melaniphy, Michael P. Melaniphy American Public Transportation AssociationSearch for more papers by this author Michael P. Melaniphy, Michael P. Melaniphy American Public Transportation AssociationSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 June 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12098Citations: 1 Michael P. Melaniphy: is president and chief executive offi cer of the American Public Transportation Association. A nationally recognized leader, he has spent his entire career in public transportation, with more than 26 years of public and private sector leadership experience. He graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in business administration and transportation management. E-mail: mmelaniphy@apta.com Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume73, Issue4July/August 2013Pages 636-637 RelatedInformation

Risk Communication in Assisted Reproduction in Latvia: From Private Experience to Ethical Issues

The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of risk communication in the context of assisted reproduction in Latvia. The paper is based on a qualitative methodology and two types of data: media analysis and 30 semi-structured interviews (11 patients, 4 egg donors, 15 experts). The study explores a broad definition of risk communication and explores three types of risks: health, psychosocial, and moral. We ask (1), who is involved in risk communication, (2), how risks are discussed using different channels of communication, and (3), what ethical problems arise during this process. In the process of analysis, we identified four types of information channels and two strategies of risk communication used by patients, as well as several ethical problems. In our view, the analysis of risk communication practices is significant to improve patient/physician relationship, as well as better meet patients' needs for comprehensive risk information.

Handling pain: The semantic interplay of speech and co-speech hand gestures in the description of pain sensations

Pain is a private and subjective experience about which effective communication is vital, particularly in medical settings. Speakers often represent information about pain sensation in both speech and co-speech hand gestures simultaneously, but it is not known whether gestures merely replicate spoken information or complement it in some way. We examined the representational contribution of gestures in a range of consecutive analyses. Firstly, we found that 78% of speech units containing pain sensation were accompanied by gestures, with 53% of these gestures representing pain sensation. Secondly, in 43% of these instances, gestures represented pain sensation information that was not contained in speech, contributing additional, complementary information to the pain sensation message. Finally, when applying a specificity analysis, we found that in contrast with research in different domains of talk, gestures did not make the pain sensation information in speech more specific. Rather, they complemented the verbal pain message by representing different aspects of pain sensation, contributing to a fuller representation of pain sensation than speech alone. These findings highlight the importance of gestures in communicating about pain sensation and suggest that this modality provides additional information to supplement and clarify the often ambiguous verbal pain message.

Field Theory, the ‘Talking Cure,” and Metaphoric Processes

The Barangers’ field theory considers the analytic situation as dialogical, bipersonal, and at the service of the interpretation of unconscious phantasies created in the field by the shared participation of patient and analyst. They asked about the power of words to offer meaningful interpretations and their potential to return to their earlier meanings in the patient's life. Examining the richness of the spoken word as a medium for the expression of private experiences to another, I suggest that what counts in analytic work is the use of living words, linked to past and intra-analytic experiences. I suggest that in psychic life, the semantic meaning of words is embedded in their experiential and affective interpersonal meaning. The words act as the medium to link the private experience of the analysand to the private experience of the analyst without a direct intersubjective communication. I illustrate my point with the example of the analyst's warm words being savored as warm milk by a regressed analysand.

Nuove mappe per nuovi territori. Festival per la cultura, la cittadinanza, lo sviluppo

Events and festivals are hubs of people and networks, are territorial competitive goods for the development and common community goods; they are infrastructures of citizenship and relationship, they foster a transversal innovation. Thanks to their cognitive, relational and organisational content, they are geo-localised products/processes, which are nonetheless able to go beyond their territory to talk to the entire world, through the construction of functional and meaningful processes between individualism, good citizenship, multiculturalism, reputation and competition within a region and among different regions. They are formats with their own business models, forms of symbolic aggregation, that have a logics, as well as operational strategies and visions. They are territorial drivers than confront themselves with the rules of production of goods and services, but at the same time they have a specificity that makes them unique, that is, their public mission, even when they represent completely private experiences. They are processes that entail a fine conceptualisation, they are able to update the dialogue with the vocational community, to keep their identity during their change, to manage the space between fidelity and hybridization. They are dynamic containers that keep together all the components of a communitarian life: search for identity and citizenship, search for knowledge, search for leisure/pleasure. They are textual hypertexts, a matrix of matrixes that goes with the replacement of landscapes and territories in the contemporary imaginary. They are magnets, attractors of economies, viruses that modify and reshape access, life and consumption style.