The Historical Novel of Contemporary Capitalism

Special dossier on ‘La fiction politique’, eds. Emily Apter and Emmanuel Bouju.

Embracing difference and the deferral of self-government: a critical analysis of the framing and practice of contemporary peace building

This thesis analyses how dominant policy approaches to peacebuilding have moved away from a single and universalised understanding of peace to be achieved through a top-down strategy of democratisation and economic liberalisation, prevalent at the beginning of 1990s. Instead, throughout the 2000s, peacebuilders have increasingly adopted a commitment to cultivating a bottom-up and hybrid peace building process that is context-sensitive and intended to be more respectful of the needs and values of post-war societies. The projects of statebuilding in Kosovo and, to a lesser extent, in Bosnia are examined to illustrate the shift. By capturing this shift, I seek to argue that contemporary practitioners of peace are sharing the sensibility of the theoretical critics of liberalism. These critics have long contended that post-war societies cannot be governed from ‘above’ and have advocated the adoption of a bottom-up approach to peacebuilding. Now, both peace practitioners and their critics share the tendency to embrace difference in peacebuilding operations, but this shift has failed to address meaningfully the problems and concerns of post-conflict societies. The conclusion of this research is that, drawing on the assumption that these societies are not capable of undertaking sovereign acts because of their problematic inter-subjective frames, the discourses of peacebuilding (in policy-making and academic critique) have increasingly legitimised an open-ended role of interference by external agencies, which now operate from ‘below’. Peacebuilding has turned into a long-term process, in which international and local actors engage relationally in the search for ever-more emancipatory hybrid outcomes, but in which self-government and self-determination are constantly deferred. Processes of emphasising difference have thus denied the political autonomy of post-war societies and have continuously questioned the political and human equality of these populations in a hierarchically divided world.

Good Practice in EU Public Service Media and Contemporary Practice in Jordan: A Comparative Analysis

UNESCO Amman Office Foreword: UNESCO Amman office is pleased to publish a comparative analysis between good Public Service Media (PSM) practices in Europe and the contemporary practice in Jordan. The study is part of the Support to Media in Jordan project, funded by the European Union, aiming to increase media freedom, media independence and journalistic professionalism in Jordan. The state owned broadcaster, Jordan Radio and Television (JRTV), has informed, entertained and educated Jordanians for decades. JRTV reaches almost every corner of the Kingdom and has the potential to serve all Jordanians with balanced, impartial and accurate news and programmes relevant to their day-to-day lives.Based on this potential there has been a long standing ambition to transform the JRTV from a state broadcaster to a public service broadcaster; from a TV and radio that predominately serves the state, to a broadcaster that serves the public and is independent from the Government of the day. This ambition is expressed also in the Support to Media in Jordan project, agreed between the Government an the EU, under which UNESCO has been asked to produce two studies: The comparative PSM analysis and a broader media landscape assessment based on UNESCO’s Media Development Indicators (MDI’s). The Jordanian MDI assessment was carried out by a team of national and international researchers during the first six months of 2015, and builds on the rich flora of recent studies on the Jordanian media landscape, as well as on original research. The study is available in Arabic and English. Professor Naomi Sakr carried out the comparative PSM analysis parallel to the MDI study, and in close cooperation with the MDI research team and UNESCO Amman office.

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature.

Advanced side information creation techniques and framework for Wyner-Ziv video coding

Recently, several distributed video coding (DVC) solutions based on the distributed source coding (DSC) paradigm have appeared in the literature. Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video coding, a particular case of DVC where side information is made available at the decoder, enable to achieve a flexible distribution of the computational complexity between the encoder and decoder, promising to fulfill novel requirements from applications such as video surveillance, sensor networks and mobile camera phones. The quality of the side information at the decoder has a critical role in determining the WZ video coding rate-distortion (RD) performance, notably to raise it to a level as close as possible to the RD performance of standard predictive video coding schemes. Towards this target, efficient motion search algorithms for powerful frame interpolation are much needed at the decoder. In this paper, the RD performance of a Wyner-Ziv video codec is improved by using novel, advanced motion compensated frame interpolation techniques to generate the side information. The development of these type of side information estimators is a difficult problem in WZ video coding, especially because the decoder only has available some reference, decoded frames. Based on the regularization of the motion field, novel side information creation techniques are proposed in this paper along with a new frame interpolation framework able to generate higher quality side information at the decoder. To illustrate the RD performance improvements, this novel side information creation framework has been integrated in a transform domain turbo coding based Wyner-Ziv video codec. Experimental results show that the novel side information creation solution leads to better RD performance than available state-of-the-art side information estimators, with improvements up to 2 dB: moreover, it allows outperforming H.264/AVC Intra by up to 3 dB with a lower encoding complexity.

Should the U.S. adapt to the world? The first debate on american exceptionalism and its impact on the founding of the United States

This paper aims at putting into perspective the recent, post 9/11 debate on the United States‘ alleged exceptionalism and its impact on the definition of American foreign policy. It reminds the readers that the United States was born as a result of a similar debate, at a time when a crucial choice for its future was to be made. Indeed, the Founding Fathers discarded the revolutionary idea that America was altogether different from other (European) nations and, as such, could succeed in saving republicanism and concentrate on domestic affairs. As Gordon Wood and Harvey Mansfield have shown, the 1787 version of republicanism stood as a departure from its earlier version, and such a change was necessary to the creation of a full-fledged federation, therefore paving the way to the current powerful Federal Republic. The early failure of the exceptionalist creed did not cause its disappearance, as the contemporary form of exceptionalism demonstrates, but created conditions that made an enduring and powerful influence very difficult.

Um olhar sobre a música produzida na ESML para clarinete solo e clarinete e eletrónica

O presente Projeto Artístico propõe como principal objetivo a divulgação de obras para clarinete solo e para clarinete e eletrónica produzidas no seio das classes de clarinete e composição da Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. A preparação e montagem da obra de Edward Luiz Ayres d’Abreu, aqui realizada em estreia absoluta, pretende manter viva a continuidade de produção artística desta instituição a todos os níveis, neste caso, entre dois estudantes. Neste relatório estão registados os benefícios alcançados com o trabalho de pesquisa relacionado com os aspectos biográficos dos compositores, o contexto da criação das obras, assim como a análise e apuramento de questões interpretativas pouco utilizadas na música convencional como por exemplo, as técnicas clarinetísticas contemporâneas (glissando, frulato, vibrato, som e voz, multifónicos, micro-tons), a prática de música com eletrónica, ou a experiência inovadora da recriação musical em palco de uma partitura gráfica.

The role of lifelong learning (LLL) in the creation of a european knowledge- based society

This chapter appears in Encyclopaedia of Human Resources Information Systems: Challenges in e-HRM edited by Torres-Coronas, T. and Arias-Oliva, M. Copyright 2009, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Posted by permission of the publisher. URL:http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?id=7737

Challenges in the creation and development of a mathematics MOOC

The fast development of distance learning tools such as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC or MOOCs) are indicators of a shift in the way in which digital teaching and learning are understood. MOOC are a new style of online classes that allow any person with web access, anywhere, usually free of charge, to participate through video lectures, computer graded tests and discussion forums. They have been capturing the attention of many higher education institutions around the world. This paper will give us an overview of the “Introduction to Differential Calculus” a MOOC Project, created by an engaged volunteer team of Mathematics lecturers from four schools of the Polytechnic Institute of Oporto (IPP). The MOOC theories and their popularity are presented and complemented by a discussion of some MOOC definitions and their inherent advantages and disadvantages. It will also explore what MOOC mean for Mathematics education. The Project development is revealed by focusing on used MOOC structure, as well as the quite a lot of types of course materials produced. It ends with a presentation of a short discussion about problems and challenges met throughout the development of the project. It is also our goal to contribute for a change in the way teaching and learning Mathematics is seen and practiced nowadays, trying to make education more accessible to as many people as possible and increase our institution (IPP) recognition.