Search results for "Political Science"

Between improvisation and inevitability: former Latvian officials’ memoirs of the Soviet era

2016

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the autobiographies of former Soviet officials that have been published in Latvia since the 1990s. In particular, it focuses on three interrelated layers of biographical narrative: construction of social identity, strategies for avoiding the stigmatization of collaboration, and comparisons between the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. The article contends that former officials in their memoirs use a pragmatic representation of the Soviet past as the major locus of their positive identity. Through this genuine representation of the past, autobiographers emphasize virtues that might be accepted by a post-Soviet neoliberal society.

The inclusion of non-western artistic traditions in cultural policy:Contrasting social justice and public diplomacy approaches

2017

On both sides of the Atlantic, the dissemination of non-Western artistic traditions among the general public has been hampered by the prevalence of Eurocentric aesthetic standards in cultural institutions and organizations. In recent years, however, some states have taken steps in order to increase the exposure of immigrant-origin artists in a variety of disciplines, including theatre, music, dance, literature, cinema and visual arts. This article offers a systematic comparison of two such initiatives that have been developed at the national level: the Equity Office of the Canada Council for the Arts and Spain’s network of cultural ‘Houses’ (Red de Casas). While the former was assigned a so…

Informational Revolution, the Net and Cultural Identity

2003

The Baltic Sea region: hard and soft security reconsidered, Māris Andžāns & Ilvija Bruģe (eds), Riga, Latvian Institute of International Affairs,…

2018

Founded in 1992, the Latvian Institute of International Affairs is the oldest and most prominent Latvian foreign policy think tank. It regularly publishes analyses and opinion papers on Latvian for...

2019

This article examines Nicholas J. Spykman’s scholarship beyond geopolitics and International Relations (IR). Because his works have mainly been studied through these prisms, I argue that we have ov...

Kinyarwanda and Kirundi: On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries

2019

The development of the Bantu languages Kinyarwanda and Kirundi is entangled within the colonial histories of Rwanda and Burundi, first under German and then Belgian rule. From the turn of the twentieth century on, missionaries compiled grammars and dictionaries of the two mutually intelligible languages, contributing to the development and instrumentalisation of two prestigious varieties out of a larger dialect continuum. In this contribution, I trace the missionary and colonial activities of corpus planning and textualisation and summarise how Kinyarwanda and Kirundi turned into official languages with distinct linguistic boundaries. The central research question is how speakers of Kinyarw…

Sistema Distritual de Innovación

2012

Artículo distribuido bajo una licencia de uso y distribución “Creative Commons Reconocimiento-No Comercial 3.0 España”.

The cult of the entrepreneur within the EU framework: The advance of an entrepreneurship activation model

2019

This paper approaches the concept of ‘activation’ by looking at the notion of what an entrepreneur is. At present, the entrepreneur is Neo-Liberalism’s Poster Child and is enshrined in EU-2020 programmes. It should be noted that the diffusion of entrepreneurship is taking place against the background of two great changes in the social and employment fields. The first is the progressive corporatisation of wage labour, with a drive towards individualisation and taking responsibility — mainly in qualified jobs. The second is the blurring of boundaries in salaried work due to theproliferation of new kinds of self-employment. Salaried work, especially for highly-skilled staff, is being re-cast i…

Direct regional economic impact of Germany’s 1. FC Kaiserslautern through participation in the 1. Bundesliga

2015

In discussions about the use of public money for popular sports such as clubs in Germany’s 1. Bundesliga, it is often argued that the funds are well invested due to the cash flows generated by these organizations for their home regions. However, others claim the opposite. They argue that actually no positive impact is generated and, even worse, that money is leaving the region due to the clubs. The study presented here analyses the financial flows generated by the 1. FC Kaiserslautern for its home city (Kaiserslautern) and home state (Rhineland-Palatinate) during the 2010/11 season when the club participated in the 1. Bundesliga. Based on a 3-step model, the economic impact is calculated by…

Public communication of emerging sciences and technologies. Problems and challenges in the case of nanotechnology

2014

This work deals with public understanding of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Concerns about public attitudes towards both, including a lack of knowledge on the part of the general public, have lead scholars in a number of countries to conduct early studies on the social perceptions of these fields. However, this has not been the case in Spain or Latin America, where studies on the popularisation and public understanding of nanotechnology are almost non-existent. This work has a double aim. First, it seeks to contextualise and explain the Spanish situation in this regard. Second, it aims to communicate the results of a Delphi study involving nanotechnology experts (n=38) and designed to fill…