2 resultados para Goal Alignment
em AMS Tesi di Dottorato - Alm@DL - Università di Bologna
Resumo:
The research project presented in this dissertation is about text and memory. The title of the work is "Text and memory between Semiotics and Cognitive Science: an experimental setting about remembering a movie". The object of the research is the relationship between texts or "textuality" - using a more general semiotic term - and memory. The goal is to analyze the link between those semiotic artifacts that a culture defines as autonomous meaningful objects - namely texts - and the cognitive performance of memory that allows to remember them. An active dialogue between Semiotics and Cognitive Science is the theoretical paradigm in which this research is set, the major intend is to establish a productive alignment between the "theory of text" developed in Semiotics and the "theory of memory" outlined in Cognitive Science. In particular the research is an attempt to study how human subjects remember and/or misremember a film, as a specific case study; in semiotics, films are “cinematographic texts”. The research is based on the production of a corpus of data gained through the qualitative method of interviewing. After an initial screening of a fulllength feature film each participant of the experiment has been interviewed twice, according to a pre-established set of questions. The first interview immediately after the screening: the subsequent, follow-up interview three months from screening. The purpose of this design is to elicit two types of recall from the participants. In order to conduce a comparative inquiry, three films have been used in the experimental setting. Each film has been watched by thirteen subjects, that have been interviewed twice. The corpus of data is then made by seventy-eight interviews. The present dissertation displays the results of the investigation of these interviews. It is divided into six main parts. Chapter one presents a theoretical framework about the two main issues: memory and text. The issue of the memory is introduced through many recherches drown up in the field of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. It is developed, at the same time, a possible relationship with a semiotic approach. The theoretical debate about textuality, characterizing the field of Semiotics, is examined in the same chapter. Chapter two deals with methodology, showing the process of definition of the whole method used for production of the corpus of data. The interview is explored in detail: how it is born, what are the expected results, what are the main underlying hypothesis. In Chapter three the investigation of the answers given by the spectators starts. It is examined the phenomenon of the outstanding details of the process of remembering, trying to define them in a semiotic way. Moreover there is an investigation of the most remembered scenes in the movie. Chapter four considers how the spectators deal with the whole narrative. At the same time it is examined what they think about the global meaning of the film. Chapter five is about affects. It tries to define the role of emotions in the process of comprehension and remembering. Chapter six presents a study of how the spectators account for a single scene of the movie. The complete work offers a broad perspective about the semiotic issue of textuality, using both a semiotic competence and a cognitive one. At the same time it presents a new outlook on the issue of memory, opening several direction of research.
Resumo:
Why some powers manage to coordinate their security efforts while others confront each other as rivals is still one of the most relevant and debated questions in the field of IR theory. The dissertation wants to give a contribution to this important debate. In particular, the main goal of the research is to analyse the dynamics of great power interactions after the end of hegemonic conflicts, that is to understand why, following the defeat of the common enemies, some of the winning allies continue to cooperate, while others begin to engage in political and military competition. In order to understand this difference, the study compares the explanatory value of two rival theoretical perspectives: neorealism, in its main version of the balance of power framework, and a liberal approach focused on domestic politics. The thesis is divided in two sections. In the first, I do summarize the main assumptions and predictions of the theories, from which I derive two different sets of hypotheses on the evolution of post-war great power relations. In the second part, I test the hypotheses by focusing on two cases of post-war alignment dynamics: 1) the relations among Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain and France after the Napoleonic wars; 2) the relations among the US, the UK, France and Italy after the end of WWI. The historical cases disconfirm the logic of the balance of power and confirm the liberal hypotheses, seeing that the results of the analysis show changes in the domestic structures of the great powers had a much larger impact on the emergence of new alliances and rivalries than did the international distribution of power. In the conclusion of the dissertation, I provide the reader with a discussion of the main theoretical implications of the empirical findings.