Cultures of Rioting and Anti-Systemic Politics in Southern Europe

The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that historical legacies and political cultures matter. In the Greek case, the transition to democracy shaped a political ‘culture of sympathy’ towards acts of resistance to the state, a culture that has been institutionalised since the mid-1970s.

Tragedy, Euripides, Melodrama: Hamartia, Medea, Liminality

This article examines socio-historical dimensions and cultural and dramaturgic implications of the Greek playwright Euripides’ treatment of the myth of Medea. Euripides gives voice to victims of adventurism, aggression and betrayal in the name of ‘reason’ and the ‘state’ or ‘polity.’ Medea constitutes one of the most powerful mythic forces to which he gave such voice by melodramatizing the disturbing liminality of Greek tragedy’s perceived social and cultural order. The social polity is confronted by an apocalyptic shock to its order and its available modes of emotional, rational and social interpretation. Euripidean melodramas of horror dramatize the violation of rational categories and precipitate an abject liminality of the tragic vision of rational order. The dramaturgy of Euripides’ Medea is contrasted with the norms of Greek tragedy and examined in comparison with other adaptations — both ancient and contemporary — of the myth of Medea, in order to unfold the play’s transgression of a tragic vision of the social polity.

Jazz in Athens: Frustrated Cosmopolitans in a Music Subculture

This paper presents an ethnographic account of jazz music in Athens. The small scene under scrutiny is mainly populated by professional session instrumentalists of the Greek popular music scene who perform jazz as a side activity for their own pleasure. In the process, they construct a conceptual dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘play’. Drawing on the author’s extended involvement in this scene, and focusing on private interviews with musicians, this article unveils the discourses of cosmopolitanism invoked through local jazz music making. The ethnographic material presented aims to illustrate how even a small subculture can serve as a terrain for contesting cosmopolitan imaginaries.

Decoding semantics across fMRI sessions with different stimulus modalities:a practical MVPA study

Both embodied and symbolic accounts of conceptual organization would predict partial sharing and partial differentiation between the neural activations seen for concepts activated via different stimulus modalities. But cross-participant and cross-session variability in BOLD activity patterns makes analyses of such patterns with MVPA methods challenging. Here, we examine the effect of cross-modal and individual variation on the machine learning analysis of fMRI data recorded during a word property generation task. We present the same set of living and non-living concepts (land-mammals, or work tools) to a cohort of Japanese participants in two sessions: the first using auditory presentation of spoken words; the second using visual presentation of words written in Japanese characters. Classification accuracies confirmed that these semantic categories could be detected in single trials, with within-session predictive accuracies of 80-90%. However cross-session prediction (learning from auditory-task data to classify data from the written-word-task, or vice versa) suffered from a performance penalty, achieving 65-75% (still individually significant at p « 0.05). We carried out several follow-on analyses to investigate the reason for this shortfall, concluding that distributional differences in neither time nor space alone could account for it. Rather, combined spatio-temporal patterns of activity need to be identified for successful cross-session learning, and this suggests that feature selection strategies could be modified to take advantage of this.

Truth Recovery and Transitional Justice: Deferring human rights issues

This book investigates why some societies defer the solution of transitional justice issues, such as the disappeared/missing, even after successful democratic consolidation. It also explains why the same societies finally decide to deal with these human rights issues. In short, it considers the interesting and understudied phenomenon of post-transitional justice. The prolonged silences in Spain, Cyprus and Greece contradict the experience of other countries -- such as South Africa, Bosnia, and Guatemala -- where truth recovery for disappeared/missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democracy. Despite democratization, the exhumation of mass graves containing the victims from the violence in Cyprus (1963-1974) and the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) was delayed until the early 2000s, when both countries suddenly decided to revisit the past. Cyprus and Spain are not alone: this is an increasing trend among countries trying to come to terms with past violence. Interestingly, despite similar background conditions, Greece is resisting the trend, challenging both theory and regional experience. Truth Recovery and Transitional Justice considers three interrelated issues. First, what factors can explain prolonged silence on the issue of missing persons in some transitional settings? Second, which processes can address the occasional yet puzzling transformation of victims’ groups from opponents of truth recovery to vocal pro-reconciliation pressure groups? Third, under which conditions is it better to tie victims’ rights to an overall political settlement? The book looks at Spain and Cyprus to show how they have attempted to bring closure to deep trauma by exhuming and identifying their missing, albeit under considerably different conditions. It then probes the generalizability of the conclusions on Spain and Cyprus by looking at the Greek experience; oddly, despite similar background conditions, Greece remains resistant to post-transitional justice norms. Interestingly, each case study takes a different approach to transitional justice.

'If we do not cut social spending, we will end up like Greece': Challenging consent to austerity through social work action

'If we do not cut social spending, we will end up like Greece'. Establishment politicians and media figures use this new ideological mantra throughout the Western world to frighten people into consenting to further neo-liberal restructuring along with cuts in social spending. This phrase and other ideologically laden assertions hide the real causes of the Greek public debt crisis. This commentary challenges the dominant discourse by contextualizing the Greek case within the larger global neo-liberal restructuring processes and then, drawing upon Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual, proposes ways that the members of the Professional Association of Social Workers (PASW) can engage in a war of ideas and action, as organic intellectuals, to delegitimize the dominant discourse, which seeks consent for social spending cuts and further neo-liberal restructuring of society. © The Author(s) 2013.

Productive Knowledge of English Binomials by Japanese Learners of English

The purpose of this research is to reveal (1) which English binomials Japanese learners of English have productive knowledge of and (2) what strategies they use to produce English binomials when they do not know the binomials. One hundred and three Japanese learners of English with intermediate proficiency level completed an online survey of 44 binomials. The participants were given the first word of a binomial and asked to type a word following “and”. The target word was provided by more than 75% of participants for 19 of the 44 binomials, meaning that learners have productive knowledge for certain binomials. An analysis of errors suggested that the participants relied heavily on semantic relationships between items in binomials.However, the use of a semantic strategy for producing the second words often leads to non-binomial expressions. From these results we suggest that giving more input to learners, as well as teaching the “Me first” principle (Cooper & Ross, 1975) explicitly would help the learners to develop more accurate and effective strategies for uncertain or unfamiliar binomials.

English picturebook illustrations and language development in early years education

Este estudo investiga a influência da interação imagem-texto de três álbuns ilustrados de língua inglesa no desenvolvimento do repertório linguístico de crianças pré-leitoras. Numa metodologia de estudo de caso, adotando uma abordagem qualitativa e socio construtivista num contexto real de educação pré-escolar, três grupos de crianças portuguesas foram filmados ao longo de várias sessões de leitura repetida em voz alta e em inglês, e de sessões de recontos trabalhados em pequenos grupos. Após a transcrição das gravações, o corpus resultante foi analisado com base numa teoria fundamentada de compreensão literária e em escalas de leitura emergente. Os resultados mostraram que as crianças adotaram uma postura fortemente analítica face aos álbuns, direcionando as suas respostas para as ilustrações e usando-as como apoio na construção de significados. Os resultados mostraram também que cada interanimação visual e verbal ofereceu diversas oportunidades para o uso das línguas em presença, o português e o inglês, tendo o formato e a estrutura inerentes a cada álbum contribuído de forma muito relevante para as respostas das crianças. Contudo, os álbuns com uma dinâmica imagem-texto mais complexa proporcionaram um maior envolvimento das crianças, provocando mais discussão em torno das ilustrações e criando mais oportunidades para mediação do uso da segunda língua. Os resultados revelaram ainda a importância da interação durante as leituras repetidas, na compreensão e na análise narrativa, num processo de desenvolvimento da linguagem. Com base nestes resultados, apontam-se conclusões, com implicações para os contextos educativos, quer ao nível da língua materna, quer ao nível da segunda língua, nomeadamente em relação: à seleção de álbuns e à valorização das ilustrações e ainda à importância de leituras repetidas em voz alta e à discussão realizada pelas crianças.

Tartessos: a construção de identidades através do registo escrito e da documentação arqueológica : um estudo comparativo

Tese de doutoramento, História (Arqueologia), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2014

Representações do ctonismo na cultura grega (séculos VIII-V a.C.)

Tese de doutoramento, História (História Antiga), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2014

Da catábase e da anábase : itinerários entre mundos, da Suméria a Roma

Tese de doutoramento, História (História e Cultura das Religiões), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2016

Direitos das crianças institucionalizadas: um estudo de caso num centro de acolhimento temporário

Dissertação de 2º Ciclo conducente ao grau de Mestre em Ciências da Educação, especialização em Intervenção Precoce.

A palavra do corpo em João Mota : um estudo sobre a presença, o corpo e a palavra nos espetáculos "Cyrano de Bergerac" e "Play Strindberg" : dissertação

Dissertação submetida à Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Artes Performativas - especialização em Interpretação

Evaluation of outpatient child-adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in Attica-Greece

ABSTRACT: Background: Childhood is a critical time for social and emotional development, educational progress and mental health prevention. Mental health for children and adolescents is defined by the achievement of expected developmental, cognitive, social and emotional skills. The development of child-adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) is a necessity for each country, not only as a prevention measure for the wellbeing of people, but also as an investment to the future of countries. Qualitative evaluation of services is the only way to ensure whether services function under quality standards and increase the possibility of better outcomes for their patients. This study examines the greek outpatient CAMHS against the British Standards of National Institute of Excellence for community CAMHS. The Standards assessed refer to the areas of Assessment, Care and Intervention. Objectives: The main objectives of the study are 1) to evaluate Greek outpatient CAMHS in the Attica region 2) to promote the evaluation process for mental health services in Greece. Methods: Due to the fact that Greek services are based on the British model, the tool used was the British self-review questionnaire of Quality Network for Community CAMHS(QNCC).The tool was translated, adapted and posted to services. Twelve out of twenty outpatient CAMHS of Attica (including Athens) responded. Data was collected and performed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences SPSS. Results: The study resulted that the CAMHS examined, meet moderately the British Standards of 1) Referral and Access, 2) Assessment & Care planning, 3) Care & Intervention. Two out of twelve services examined, meet the standards of "Assessment and Care" in a higher percentage between 75% and 100%. Conclusions: The paper describes a satisfactory function of CAMHS in Attica prefecture taking into consideration the extremely difficult political situation of Greece at the time of the research. Strong and weak domains are identified. Also the translation and adaptation of British tools promote the evaluation process and quality assurance of Greek CAMHS.