Search results for "world"
showing 10 items of 1612 documents
The Rise and Fall of the Aizjomi Landscape†
2012
Jurmalciems, an ancient fishing-farming village on the Baltic Sea coast in southwestern Latvia, provides the setting for this article. In this setting I focus on the notion of dwelling in a landscape that comes to reflect the residents' lifeworld. The holistic notion of "dwelling" incorporates the complex and multiple dimensions of human life spent in the physical landscape, where time and space, nature and culture, are bound together and where local and macrolevel historical and social circumstances determine them both. This study is my attempt to understand a visible reality: the aizjonii landscape that is etched into the topography in the form of fields carved and embosomed into sandbank…
Saint Adalbert – the Apostle of Silesia
2017
Bishop Adalbert is known under many names but only one source refers to him as the ‘Apostle of Silesia’: a mediaeval chronicle of the Opole Dominicans. Since the II World War the chronicle is lost. The contents of the chronicle were recently reconstructed thanks to an archival research in the manuscript department of the Wrocław University Library, the National Archive in Prague and the Dominican General Archive on Aventine hill in Rome. According to the source, saint Adalbert had visited Opole about 984. In Górka (the Hill) he was supposed to christianize local society and baptize them. When he was run out of baptizing water, the fountain came to the top and lasted till the beginning of th…
India Re-loaded: Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire as a Postcolonial Novel
2012
Once “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, India for some time ceased to be the focus of interest for the British writers. Largely due to the success of its film version, Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire (Black Swan, London, 2005, originally called Q and A) again drew the attention of the Western world to the problems postcolonial India has to face: poverty, crime, sex abuse, exploitation of children, police brutality and many more. In this paper, however, we are not going to compare the two versions of the story, i.e. the novel and the film, but primarily concentrate on the textual commentaries in the context of postcolonial theory and literature. Of particular interest for us …
Exploiting the Exiles: Soviet Émigrés in U.S. Cold War Strategy
2012
This article discusses the abortive U.S. government effort to organize Soviet émigrés after World War II. After years of a lack of interest on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet émigrés and émigré politics came to the fore with the onset of the Cold War. The U.S. government sought to use émigrés in political and psychological warfare against the Soviet bloc. The many studies that have looked at Cold War-era psychological warfare have largely ignored U.S. plans to enlist Soviet émigrés on the West's behalf. Attempts to create a political forum for anti-Bolshevik Soviet émigrés were broader than have been understood thus far, revealing important information about…
Return Visits: The European Background of Transcultural Life Writing
2013
In this article I read autobiographies by East Europeans who immigrated to Canada in connection with the Second World War as examples of transcultural life writing. My focus on the representation of return visits of these loyal Canadian citizens to their country of origin after 1989 reveals the underlying intention of relating the experience of life in a multicultural democratic society to the emergence of a new political consciousness in Eastern Europe. In my analysis I distinguish four types of concerns which try to bridge the past of their childhood experiences with the formation of a transcultural life in the 21st century: 1. Anna Porter’s return visit to Hungary for family reunion and …
Modeling the Effects of Religious Belief and Affiliation on Prosociality
2021
To what extent do supernatural beliefs, group affiliation, and social interaction produce values and behaviors that benefit others, i.e., 'prosociality'? Addressing this question involves multiple variables interacting within complex social networks that shape and constrain the beliefs and behaviors of individuals. We examine the relationships among some of these factors utilizing data from the World Values Survey to inform the construction of an Agent-Based Model. The latter was able to identify the conditions under which – and the mechanisms by which – the prosociality of simulated agents was increased or decreased within an “artificial society” designed to reflect real world parameters. …
‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950
2020
This study examines how the Swedish press responded to and portrayed the Holocaust immediately after the war. The liberation of the camps, the role and guilt of ordinary Germans, the Nuremberg trials and the ongoing problem of Jewish DPs in Europe were the most important issues on the basis of which the Swedish press had shaped the early post-war view of the Holocaust. Moreover, the fate of the Jews under Nazi Germany formed an important element of such reporting. The author argues that, contrary to the dominant Anglo-American historiography, which holds that the first post-war decades were marked by silence surrounding the German genocide, the Swedish press wrote about the Holocaust often …
Transcribing the "Estoria de Espanna" using crowdsourcing: Strategies and aspirations
2015
This paper examines the specific strategies for recruitment and retention of volunteer transcribers in use in two collaborative transcription projects: Transcribe Bentham (University College, London) and the Estoria de Espanna Digital Project (University of Birmingham). The aim of the paper is to review the strategies used by Transcribe Bentham, a more mature crowdsourced electronic transcription project, with a view to informing the strategies put into place in the Estoria project, which has started transcribing using crowdsourcing more recently. The paper discusses the difficulties faced by crowdsourced electronic transcription projects and how these have been and are being resolved in th…
Vācu civilās pārvaldes ekonomiskā politika okupētajā Latvijā 1941.-1944.
2014
Promocijas darbā „Vācu civilās pārvaldes ekonomiskā politika okupētajā Latvijā 1941 – 1944” tiek pētīta vācu ekonomiskā politika Latvijas ģenerālapgabalā, vācu civilās okupācijas pārvaldes pastāvēšanas laikam nosakot pētījuma hronoloģisko ietvaru. Darba galvenā uzmanība tiek pievērsta okupācijas varas saimnieciskai koncepcijai un tās izpausmēm ekonomikā, tostarp lauksaimniecības politikā, ilgstošajā reprivatizācijas jautājumā, rūpniecībā. Skatīta tiek arī Latvijas Zemes pašpārvaldes loma ekonomiskajos procesos, Latvijas iedzīvotāju iesaistīšana sabiedriskajos darbos, gūstekņu nodarbināšana un to kopējā nozīme ekonomikā, kā arī Latvijas iedzīvotāju attieksme pret okupācijas varu saimniecisko…
Archive Photography That Forms a Personal and Collective Memory
2021
Personal and family albums created by Latvians in the period from 1939 until the 1950s are placed in a wider social and historical perspective by analyzing its content, as well as the individual intent to create it. This work explores photography album as a tool to organize memories and how historical, personal photography albums serve and interact as evidence of private as well as a public past. The research tries to prove the historical authenticity in two personal albums created by Latvians during the Second World War and the following years – a visual diary illustrating the imprisonment in the Soviet working camp in Siberia and a family album memorializing the way and life of the Latvia…