Humanities in a Public Sphere

Journalist Helen Aguirre Ferre lectures on the subject of the humanities in the public sphere in South Florida. Event held at the Green Library, Modesto Maidique Campus, Florida International University, on February 6, 2013.

Development of the Sphere Overlap Scale (SOS) : compartmentalization and the spillover hypothesis

The purpose of this study was to create a scale that could measure compartmentalization. In the first of two studies 311 working undergraduates were asked to indicate agreement with 119 items that measured compartmentalization. The resulting scale's reliability and validity were evaluated by having a second sample of 312 working students complete the items that comprise a sphere overlap scale, two measures of spillover, and a measure of personality, coping, and demoralization. Although the study's original goal was not realized, its procedures were successful in developing a short (10-item) measure of work-to-home spillover whose items loaded on a single factor. Structural equation modeling indicated that SOS items were correlated with existing measures of spillover and could be discriminated from related concepts of personality and coping. The SOS was also more highly correlated with demoralization than existing measures of spillover in hierarchical analyses that controlled for demographic factors, personality characteristics, and coping style. It is concluded that the SOS shows enough promise to warrant the cost of its appraisal as an alternative measure of spillover in a longitudinal study.

A ‘right to have rights’ in the EU public sphere? An Arendtian justification for the application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

This paper discusses the Court’s reasoning in interpreting the EU Charter, using recent case law on horizontal effect as a case study. It identifies two possible means of interpreting the provisions of the Charter: firstly, an approach based on common values (e.g. equality or solidarity) and, secondly, an approach based on access to the public sphere. It argues in favour of the latter. Whereas an approach based on common values is more consonant with the development of the case law so far, it is conceptually problematic: it involves subjective assessments of the importance and degree of ‘sharedness’ of the value in question, which can undermine the equal constitutional status of different Charter provisions. Furthermore, it marginalises the Charter’s overall politically constructional character, which distinguishes it from other sources of rights protection listed in Art 6 TEU. The paper argues that, as the Charter’s provisions concretise the notion of political status in the EU, they have a primarily constitutional, rather than ethical, basis. Interpreting the Charter based on the very commitment to a process of sharing, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the ‘right to have rights’ (a right to access a political community on equal terms), is therefore preferable. This approach retains the pluralistic, post-national fabric of the EU polity, as it accommodates multiple narratives about its underlying values, while also having an inclusionary impact on previously underrepresented groups (e.g. non-market-active citizens or the sans-papiers) by recognising their equal political disposition.

The Riemann sphere in GeoGebra

The stereographic projection is a bijective smooth map which allows us to think the sphere as the extended complex plane. Among its properties it should be emphasized the remarkable property of being angle conformal that is, it is an angle measure preserving map. Unfortunately, this projection map does not preserve areas. Besides being conformal it has also the property of projecting spherical circles in either circles or straight lines in the plane This type of projection maps seems to have been known since ancient times by Hipparchus (150 BC), being Ptolemy (AD 140) who, in his work entitled "The Planisphaerium", provided a detailed description of such a map. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to mention that the property of the invariance of angle measure has only been established much later, in the seventeenth century, by Thomas Harriot. In fact, it was exactly in that century that the Jesuit François d’Aguilon introduced the terminology "stereographic projection" for this type of maps, which remained up to our days. Here, we shall show how we create in GeoGebra, the PRiemannz tool and its potential concerning the visualization and analysis of the properties of the stereographic projection, in addition to the viewing of the amazing relations between Möbius Transformations and stereographic projections.

Discrimination in the Private Sphere. A subjective Right or a Legal Abuse. An European North American Legal Comparative Study

En el presente trabajo se estudian los límites de la autonomía privada desde la perspectiva del derecho a la igualdad y del principio de no discriminación tanto en el derecho norteamericano como en el europeo, con especial incidencia a la doctrina española. Por un lado se plantea si la piedra angular a la hora de establecer límites a la autonomía privada debe ser el concepto de dignidad o el de igualdad, por otro superando dicho debate se propone un acercamiento al problema entendido como una colisión entre derechos fundamentales en la que en cada concreto supuesto ha de estudiarse cual debe prevalecer. Finalmente se estima conveniente seguir el modelo de la Constitución de Sudáfrica y entender que los derechos fundamentales afectan directamente tanto a las relaciones horizontales como verticales, es decir tanto al ámbito público como privado.

WOMEN, CYCLING, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: HOW DISCURSIVE AND COMMUNITY PRACTICES AFFECT ENGAGEMENT

This thesis considers the impact that discursive and community practices have on women’s access to the public sphere by examining female cyclists and a cycling community in Miami, Florida via interviews and observation. In the interviews, female cyclists frequently reported fears for their safety, including concern over harassment, when riding in public space. I interviewed participants of the cycling community and observed Emerge Miami’s meetings and events, where publicly organized cycling excursions were a major component. Using the theoretical and methodological lenses of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis and Communities of Practice, I examined the interviews to understand how participants discursively framed and contextualized gender-based harassment. I found two meta-discourse frames in operation: a normative frame (that essentially accepted the status quo) and a feminist frame (that challenged the “naturalness” of women’s harassment as just what one had to live with). The feminist frame offered a pathway for women to exert control over their experiences and alter the cultural understanding of harassment’s meaning and effect. The local community practices of Emerge Miami also challenged the normative frames that often silence women, employing explicitly invitational practices, which demonstrates how local discursive and social activity can impact and increase women’s involvement by creating a more accessible space for women to engage with their local cycling community.