Thematic Section Research Articles

Introduction to the Thematic Section

Introduction to the Thematic Section

Introduction: Replicating John Hedley Brooke’s Work on the History of Science and Religion

In this introduction, we first briefly describe the replication crisis as it occurred primarily in the biomedical and social sciences. We then argue for the possibility and desirability of replication in the humanities, particularly historiography. After that, we clarify why we opted for the replication of John Hedley Brooke’s 1991 book Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, specifically its third chapter. We elucidate why we chose to do both a direct and a conceptual replication. Finally, we lay out the procedures we used to conduct the two replication studies and look ahead to what is to come in this thematic section.

Blind Spots in Crowds, Masses, and Multitudes

The brief historical overview comprises an account of classical crowd theories and their contemporary metamorphoses to contextualize the thematic section of the journal. Regarding the proverbial “age of the crowd” of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, a variety of attempts of conceptualization proved controversial but productive. Hyppolite Taine, Scipio Sighele, or Gustave Le Bon approached the phenomenon dominantly in psychological terms foregrounding the destructive elements of mass dynamics. In the interwar period, however, a first wave of differentiation might be detected, insofar as younger academic sub-disciplines, i.e., social statistics, seek to grasp the crowd as a structure with its intricate and partly paradoxical qualities. In recent scholarship, however, the diversification of the concept seems to have become even more complex: by shifting the focus from the “object crowd” to the “subject crowd”, descriptions of the multitude, the network, the swarm, or the assembly reflect the need to think of the crowd as an autonomous agency with emancipatory potentials.

Universities as knowledge incubators: Possibilities for novelty

The current Thematic Section is dedicated to possibilities of maintaining and enhancing of new knowledge production function of universities, with a focus on the social sciences. It starts from the assumption that our contemporary university administration systems have become inflexible due to their bureaucratic overgrowth of regulations of university studies. From that follows the need to create new conditions to knowledge incubators—groups of researchers united with goals of innovation in a given field. The different contributions cover the relevance for knowledge incubation improved funding possibilities, new technologies (AI), and general intellectual atmosphere in universities. This atmosphere is generated through a set of local social norm systems about inclusion <> exclusion of participants in different places on university territories, the demand structures of assignments, plagiarism tests, and organization of examinations. All these super-curricular structures enhance the fixed knowledge transfer functions of higher education in contrast to new knowledge incubation. The latter is particularly important in the social sciences since new ways of understanding human beings within societies are needed. Contributions to this Section also outline the socio-political constraints upon knowledge incubation. Paradoxically it can be the application for and success in gaining research funding that can curtail innovation in ideas in the social sciences.

Introduction

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today is an epicenter for the theorization of absence. Scholars, in efforts to counter the politics that have erased and continue to erase humans and places from the region, frequently assert the microdynamics of resistance, resilience, and memory. The editors of the special section, “Following Absence,” acknowledge the urgent need for narratives of overcoming destruction and for acts of care and repair. However, this introduction articulates a different intellectual labor—one that examines the ways absences linger and perdure across the MENA. Rather than restoring or recuperating modes of presence, the editors ask, in what ways might absence be told and accounted for? How might new plotlines widen the scope of what can be perceived as absence, its work in the world, and the forms of agency and injury it shapes? In dialogue with the environmental humanities, this thematic section approaches human lives in embodied proximities to the nonhuman. It also relinquishes the need for storytelling to begin from a moment when annihilating violence has ceased, as though erasure could be safely contained in the past. Repetitive and accumulating, recursive and anticipatory, absences inhabit the present and future. Acknowledging these branching, seeping plotlines, the editors urge against any unified theory of absence for, or from, the MENA. Absence is defined by negation, fragments, and residues. By refusing its systematization in scholarship, this introduction calls for modes of attention that refuse the logics of power and foreground instead the flourishing of ongoing life. It then previews the special section's themes and articles.

Mental Health in the Context of Migration: Introduction to the Thematic Section

Mental Health in the Context of Migration: Introduction to the Thematic Section

Editorial for Thematic Section: Theory and Applications of Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks, and Metaheuristics

Editorial for Thematic Section: Theory and Applications of Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks, and Metaheuristics

Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings

In global intellectual history, there exists a tension between analytical concepts often carrying a Western or colonial pedigree andtheir ability to capture the multifaceted reality of historical actors who cannot be placed in one language or culture alone. The thematic section titled ‘Analytical Concepts for Transcultural Settings’ highlights the role of global intellectual historians as mediators who balance local realities with global narratives. It emphasises how rethinking the crucial role of analytical concepts can help historical actors challenge and transcend conventional categories, urging historians to adapt their analytical frameworks for transcultural settings accordingly.

Images, clusters and types – Making sense of (large) image corpora and related practices in and with digital media

In November 2021, the Visual Communication Division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK) celebrated its 20th anniversary at the University of Trier with a one-year pandemic delay. Marion G. Müller, Katharina Christ and Christof Barth organized an excellent conference to mark the occasion and to reflect on past and current trends, topics, and challenges in visual communication research. Resuming the thematic scope of the division’s first conference held in Hamburg in 2000, the conference focused on “The power of images – Images of power. On visual political communication in digital contexts.” While analyses of press photography in the tradition of political iconology were the main approaches twenty years ago, the program of the anniversary conference demonstrated diversified thematic foci and methodological approaches. The presentations examined a broad range of visual digital media and visual communication exerted by various actors ranging from the press to politicians to activists and citizens. Concurrently, we also saw a considerable diversity concerning methodological approaches and a rising influence of computational methods for analyzing the increasingly large numbers of images in digital media environments. With the panel “Image type / image cluster analysis as an approach to analyzing large numbers of images in online environments,” a discussion on diverse methodological approaches and their potentials and challenges among our members started. After the conference, we decided to open up our internal discussion and reach out to international colleagues working on similar questions. The long-term result is this Thematic Section on diverse methods for structuring image data corpora drawing on different traditions of visual analysis.

Thematic Section: Femicide – a persistence social issue

Thematic Section: Femicide – a persistence social issue

Thematic Section: Advances in Pattern Recognition

Thematic Section: Advances in Pattern Recognition

Healthcare: Public Policies, Social Practices, and Individual Experiences. An Introduction

Abstract This thematic section focuses on health as a multilayered political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. Based on case studies from Southeastern Europe, the four articles in the section pose research questions that are important for understanding the interplay between personal experiences of using healthcare services, trust in the healthcare system, and the governance of healthcare service provision in the region. The articles build on complementary perspectives on individual experiences of interacting with healthcare providers, social issues, and public health strategies, drawing a multidimensional “health map” with interrelated but sometimes diverging arguments. This allows a better understanding of the issues of health and illness in turbulent times of social crises and provides a conceptual basis for healthcare policies in Southeastern Europe.

Introduction to thematic section: Challenges to the perfect machine-translation situation

The purpose of the thematic section is to gauge the temperature of MT today by tapping into a selection of critical discussions, thereby shedding light on some challenges to a perfect machine-translation (MT) situation.

Concepts of Agency: Introduction to the Thematic Section

Concepts of Agency: Introduction to the Thematic Section

Репрезентация этничности коренных малочисленных народов. Введение к специальной теме номера

The indigenous peoples of Russia exist as a separate category according to the official list, which includes 47 peoples. The indigenous people of small numbers are preserved not only due to the traditional culture inherited from their ancestors and the connection with the ancestral territory of their formation, but also due to the established relations with the surrounding peoples. This thematic section includes a study of the processes and strategies for transforming the lives of indigenous peoples. How does the image of indigenous peoples change over time? How does cyberreality merge with reality, and cyberethnicity become an integral part of modern ethnicity? How do habitual patterns of behavior and activity change, and does locality connect with globality? The selection of articles has a wide thematic and temporal coverage from the study of the perception of ethnicity in the 1920s to today's realities. The authors studied the strategies of representation of ethnicity in the 1920s — 1930s, as well as modern ethnic processes, including virtual interaction. The papers use various tools to analyze modern forms of ethnicity, including cartography and cyberethnography. The topic of the recently published results of the All-Russian Census of the Population among Small Indigenous Peoples is touched upon in the section, which actualizes and unites the experiences of positioning identity among ethnic communities. We hope that these papers will help to see new perspectives on the ethnic identity of small indigenous peoples, and new methods and broad thematic and time frames will enable a comprehensive analysis. The research results will help to expand the topic, update it and emphasize the current realities. Meanwhile, indigenous minorities today are characterized by adaptability, plasticity and strategic thinking, and the study of their resource potential is the task of modern researchers.

Editorial

We are presenting you with another issue of Perspectives on Culture. The current issue of our quarterly is related to a multifaceted cultural and historical reflection on the presence of costume in culture over the centuries, to which topic a thematic section has been devoted. The editing work was undertaken by Professors: Beata Bigaj-Zwonek, Izabela Kaczmarzyk and Monika Stankiewicz-Kopeć of the Institute of Cultural Studies and Journalism at the Ignatianum University in Cracow. The topic proved to be extremely popular and aroused great interest, hence the section itself, as well as the entire issue, is the most extensive one in the journal’s several-year history.
 The issue you are reviewing is rich in content, which is not just about the number of texts, but also their thematic diversity. It contains 38 texts, 23 of which are within the thematic section, and the rest fall under the regular sections of the magazine: Management and Marketing and Varia. There are also four texts in the Reviews (2) and Reports (2) sections.
 We hope you will find this issue interesting. We wish you a pleasant and useful reading.

Introducción a la sección temática

An introduction to the special thematic section by the guest editor.

Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books

This introduction lays the foundation for a collection of high-quality research papers, presenting novel findings, innovative scientific approaches, and the latest developments in the field of the history of Catholic censorship, libricide, and the preservation of Hebrew books during late medieval and early modern Italy. The primary objective of this thematic section is to investigate diverse topics, including the Catholic censorship and expurgation of Hebrew texts, books, and documents. Additionally, it explores the repurposing of these materials in book bindings and notary files, shedding light on how Digital Humanities facilitates the recovery of manuscripts or printed books that would otherwise be lost to history.

LITERARY FAIRY TALE AS A MEANS OF FORMING THE TOLERANCE IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

The article deals with the study of the pedagogical potential of a literary fairy tale as a means of forming tolerance in primary school children. As illustrative material, the authors use LGBT fairy tales that actually reflect the topics that previously considered taboo. The aim of the research is to analyze modern queer tales considering social and literary tendencies, to determine the thematic section and to investigate the peculiarities of character creating process, as well as to generalize and systematize the literary experience of queer texts and trace how such fairy tales help to form a tolerant attitude towards others. The object of research is modern queer tales, which have become significant in culture and have caused mixed reaction. The research methodology involves historical-comparative, existential, hermeneutic and culturological methods. In postmodern world, there are significant changes in a person’s awareness of his/her place in the family and among people, there is also a search for self-identification and understanding of what is moral or immoral. The changes in social, value, and morality are reflected in fiction, which captures “possible – impossible”, “right – wrong”, “bad – good” at certain stages of development of the society. The appearance of queer literature and discussions around them testify to the readiness of the society for dialogue and understanding that the world is beautiful in its diversity. A person with his/her qualities, values, uniqueness and desire to be useful to the society in queer tales occupies an important place. Equally important is the issue of freedom to choose a life path, life purpose, a partner, as well as the right to self-expression. The origin and development of the issue is researched, the first LGBT books for children are briefly analyzed, and the most recent and most popular tales are focused on. Among them are “King and King” by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland (2002), “The bravest Knight that Ever Lived” by Daniel Errico (2014), “The Princes and the Treasure” by Jeffrey A. Miles (2014), “Princess Princess Ever After” by Katie O’Neill (2016). The narrative features of these tales are elucidated, a comparative analysis of the folklore tale and a new literary one is carried out. The structural matrix of the queer tale has been determined as a traditional one: tasks, hero and helper, journey, initiation, magic objects and happy end. Attention is focused on the characteristics of queer characters: their traits, actions, relationship with people. The problems and the leading motives of the tales are identified, and it is emphasized that the purpose of such literature is to show the world in its diversity, where there is a place for everyone. It is also advisable to focus on the deeds and actions of the characters but not on their sexual preferences.

Media persistence: Theories, approaches, categorization

Despite the fact that new media are continually seen as “natural born killers” of old media, old media rarely die and very often persist. In what is alternately called the “age of the Internet,” the “digital revolution,” the “metaverse,” the era of “artificial intelligence,” old media such as books, cinema, radio, television, analogue photography, and several others are still in use. Moreover, there is a kind of re-emergence of “the analogue” in various forms and for different incentives, including nostalgia. This Thematic Section is the outcome of an intellectual journey that the five editors undertook first separately and then combined. The occasion for bringing together prior interests and combining theoretical and empirical understandings of the reasons why and the different modes how media persist over time was facilitated by the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) virtual post-conference (co-)organized jointly by three ECREA sections in September 2021: the Communication History section together with the sections of Radio and Sound, as well as Television Studies. It is no coincidence that these three sections are concerned with old media, which seem to decline but apparently also do persist, as those are the sections dealing with the mediated relationship of the old and the new, the past and the present such as the viewing and screening practices of television, transformation of sonic environment from radio toward podcast, and in general old media remediating into new ones.