Home is Where the Human is?:Ethics, Intervention and Hospitality in Kosovo

The human is frequently made central to the way international ethics is thought and practiced. Yet, frequently, the human can be used to close down ethical options rather than open them up. This article examines the case of British foreign policy in Kosovo. It argues that the human in this context was placed at the centre of ethical action, but was discursively constructed as a silent, biopolitial mass which could only be saved close to its territorially qualified home. It could not be protected by being brought to the UK. To remain human, the subject of ethical concern, the Kosovan refugee, had to remain near Kosovo. This construction of the human-home relationship meant that military humanitarian intervention became the only ethical policy available; hospitality, a welcoming of the Kosovan refugee into the British home, was ruled out. This article questions such a construction of the human, listening to the voices of Kosovan refugees to open up the relationship between the human and its home. The complexity that results shows that a more nuanced view of the human would not allow itself to be co-opted so easily to a simplistic logic of intervention. Rather, it could enable the possibility of hospitality as another way of practicing international ethics.

On-line Emotion Recognition in a 3-D Activation-Valence-Time Continuum using Acoustic and Linguistic Cues

For many applications of emotion recognition, such as virtual agents, the system must select responses while the user is speaking. This requires reliable on-line recognition of the user’s affect. However most emotion recognition systems are based on turnwise processing. We present a novel approach to on-line emotion recognition from speech using Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks. Emotion is recognised frame-wise in a two-dimensional valence-activation continuum. In contrast to current state-of-the-art approaches, recognition is performed on low-level signal frames, similar to those used for speech recognition. No statistical functionals are applied to low-level feature contours. Framing at a higher level is therefore unnecessary and regression outputs can be produced in real-time for every low-level input frame. We also investigate the benefits of including linguistic features on the signal frame level obtained by a keyword spotter.

Application of Internet techniques into online collaborative design and manufacture

A research project in Web-enabled collaborative design and manufacture has been conducted. The major tasks of the project include the development of a Web-enabled environment for collaboration, online collaborative CAD/CAM, remote execution of large size programs (RELSP), and distributed product design. The tasks and Web/Internet techniques involved are presented first, followed by detail description of two approaches developed for implementation of the research: (1) a client-server approach for RELSP, where the following Internet techniques are utilized: CORBA, Microsoft’s Internet information server, Tomcat server, JDBC and ODBC; (2) Web-Services supported collaborative CAD which enables geographically dispersed designers jointly conduct a design task in the way of speaking and seeing each other and instantaneously modifying the CAD drawing online.

N1, P2 and T-complex of the auditory brain event-related potentials to tones with varying rise times in adults with and without dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty affecting the acquisition of fluent reading and spelling skills due to poor phonological processing. Underlying deficits in processing sound rise time have also been found in children and adults with dyslexia. However, the neural basis for these deficits is unknown. In the present study event-related potentials were used to index neural processing and examine the effect of rise time manipulation on the obligatory N1. T-complex and P2 responses in English speaking adults with and without dyslexia. The Tb wave of the T-complex showed differences between groups, with the amplitudes for Tb becoming less negative with increased rise time for the participants with dyslexia only. Frontocentral N1 and P2 did not show group effects. Enhanced Tb amplitude that is modulated by rise time could indicate altered neural networks at the lateral surface of the superior temporal gyrus in adults with dyslexia. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Evocative Listening : Mediated Practices in Everyday Life

The history of sonic arts is charged with transgressive practices that seek to expose the social, aural and cultural thresholds across various listening experiences, posing new questions in terms of the dialogue between listener and place. Recent work in sonic art exposes the need for an experiential understanding of listening that foregrounds the use of new personal technologies, environmental philosophy and the subject–object relationship. This paper aims to create a vocabulary that better contextualises recent installations and performances produced within the context of everyday life, by researchers and artists at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast.

Fabrication and Ms Conduct: Scrutinising Practice Through Feminist Theory

This paper describes a collaborative practice, between an architect (the author) and a textile designer; its outcomes and the critical theoretical and feminist contexts from which the practice evolved and to which it still responds. The practice advocates the interweaving of more than the yarns, material and cultures on which it is physically based, but also the intertwining of theory and technology as a means to advance architectural practice. This is done in response to Ahrentzen’s charge to feminist scholars and practitioners to ‘embrace not only the abstract conceptual nature of much postmodernist theorizing but also that derived from the serious “hanging out”, looking at, listening to, scrutinising and theorizing lived experiences of the everyday’, in this instance the everyday practice of combining concrete and textiles.

Thou art a strange fellow:Dissonance and Discordance in Intercultural Shakespeares

Any performance of the intercultural necessarily, and always, advances the question of the cultural since it involves the inter-action and interplay of unique and particular cultural performance styles and modes. Intercultural theatre, according to Pavis, is a hybrid theatrical form “drawing upon performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas. The hybridization is very often such that the original forms can no longer be distinguished.” The result of this collaboration of forms is, however, often not a ‘hybrid’ where cultural texts work cohesively and in unison to produce a harmonious mise en scene. Instead, intercultural performances are performances at the interstices and at the intersections of cultures. They raise problems of authorship, authority and performance unities and expose a sense of cultural foreignness. Consequently, intercultural performance can be said to be meta-theatre that queries the construction of culture since it places alongside performance traditions that confront.

Music, as performative unit, is a significant line of action by which the intercultural spectacle is constructed. Integral to Western theatre, and certainly more so in traditional Asian performance forms, the deliberate ‘fusion’ and ‘blending’ of musical styles in intercultural performances underscore not a harmony of diverse sounds but the possible dissonance and discordance already performed by the visual and verbal texts. The paper thus seeks to examine, in particular, the musical elements in intercultural performances such as Ong Keng Sen’s Lear (Theatreworks, 1999) and explore the ways in which music could possibly intensify the confrontation of performative texts resulting in a disruption of performance unities. When watching and listening to Lear, the question of the ‘local’ thus arises not merely with identification and alienation from what is seen but also what is familiar and foreign to one’s ears.

A New Irish? Problems of communication in modern Irish media and new speakers.

While the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking) areas of Ireland are geographically isolated from each other and relatively small in area, it is expected that the number of second language Irish speakers throughout the country should ensure the future of the language. Nevertheless, while the official standard grammar has been established for many decades, there is still a tendency in the spoken language to give precedence to regional dialectal variants in schools and the broadcast media which often raises barriers between native speakers themselves and between learners and native speakers.
All pupils in school in the Republic and many in Northern Ireland learn Irish and there has been a great increase in the number of pupils attending immersion Irish language Gaelscoileanna. But concern has been expressed about the phonetic and structural accuracy achieved in schools, all of which contributes to communication breakdown.
This paper discusses how a greater awareness of the link between phoneme and grapheme in Irish and the proposals for the Lárchanúint (Central Dialect) in the 1980s and current discussions on Caighdeán Leathan agus Caighdeán Cúng (Broad and Narrow Standard) would mitigate these concerns.

Environmental Affordances and Children in Post-conflict Belfast

This paper examines the experiences of children in post-conflict Belfast as peace and social change afford new opportunities at the same time as they regulate behaviours and spatial practices. Theoretically and empirically it draws on the concept of environmental affordances in order to map the experiences of 11-year-old children in separate inner-city segregated and middle-class communities. Whilst the recession has affected the pace of urban restructuring, children in the expanding mixed and largely middleclass city extract multiple advantages from their area in ways not available to segregated communities. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for effective listening strategies in the management of divided communities. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

Women Speaking of National Security: The Case of Checkpoint Watch

The production of reports and the distribution of information have become integral to the operation of many non-governmental organizations. In this regard, the fact that the all-women organization of Checkpoint Watch publishes reports about the Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank seems to comply with current trends. However, the reports—most of which are short repetitive descriptions of the banality and everydayness of the military checkpoints, counting the number of people and cars waiting, commenting on the manner in which the checks are performed and meticulously documenting what mostly amounts to minor incidents of humiliation and distress—do not seem to abide by any convention of reporting. This work analyzes the reporting praxis of the organization and claims that it should be understood as a form of activism in and of itself. Tracking the ways in which the reports address the Israeli public through the concept of parrhesia, the work suggests that this form of reporting enables the women activists to use their gendered marginality to make their way into the highly masculinized and militarized Israeli security discourse.

Law and Society: Volume I: Historical development

The thriving and well-established field of Law and Society (also referred to as Sociolegal Studies) has diverse methodological influences; it draws on social-scientific and arts-based methods. The approach of scholars researching and teaching in the field often crosses disciplinary borders, but, broadly speaking, Law and Society scholarship goes behind formalism to investigate how and why law operates, or does not operate as intended, in society. By exploring law’s connections with broader social and political forces—both domestic and international—scholars gain valuable perspectives on ideology, culture, identity, and social life. Law and Society scholarship considers both the law in contexts, as well as contexts in law.
Law and Society flourishes today, perhaps as never before. Academic thinkers toil both on the mundane and the local, as well as the global, making major advances in the ways in which we think both about law and society. Especially over the last four decades, scholarly output has rapidly burgeoned, and this new title from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Law series answers the need for an authoritative reference collection to help users make sense of the daunting quantity of serious research and thinking.
Edited by the leading scholars in the field, Law and Society brings together in four volumes the vital classic and contemporary contributions. Volume I is dedicated to historical antecedents and precursors. The second volume covers methodologies and crucial themes. The third volume assembles key works on legal processes and professional groups, while the final volume of the collection focuses on substantive areas. Together, the volumes provide a one-stop ‘mini library’ enabling all interested researchers, teachers, and students to explore the origins of this thriving subdiscipline, and to gain a thorough understanding of where it is today.