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New scholarship in the literature and print culture of the Progressive Era emphasizes the socially and politically transformative power of aesthetic experience. Through their attention to the physical as well as ideological spaces in which the dual projects of political reform and cultural formation via textual production and consumption were carried out, these scholars offer an account of Progressive-Era aesthetic products ranging from fiction to journalism to comics to productions of Elizabethan drama as democratic sites of social good. While previous criticism of the era's literature aligned its ideological orientation with the regressive politics of nativism and rising class divisions, these scholars, through both recovery and rereading, take a more optimistic approach that emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the textual engagement undertaken by immigrants and the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mind the Gap! Working Papers On Practice Based Doctoral Research in the Creative Arts and Media, Desmond Bell (ed.) (2016) Dublin: Distillers Press in association with the National College of Art and Design, 267 pp., ISBN: 978-1-870225-02-1, p/bk, £12 A Different Kind of Black and White: Visual Thinking as Epistemic Development in Professional Education, Prue Bramwell-Davis (2015) Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Lady Stephenson Publishing, 346 pp., ISBN (10): 1443877093; ISBN (13): 9781443877091, £26.99 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an overview of the book "Jewish Studies Between the Disciplines—Judaistik zwischen den Disziplinen. Papers in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday," edited by Klaus Herrmann, Margarete Schlüter and Giuseppe Veltri.

This paper explores how documentary cinema in war contexts can challenge gender representations. To do so, we adopt a feminist and postcolonial approach to analyze the work of Catalan non-fiction filmmaker Alba Sotorra in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Catalonia. In her films, Sotorra positions herself close to a series of subjects absorbed by wars and armed conflicts that (re)define their identities while acting beyond gender stereotypes. In particular, the paper analyzes the modes of production and representational strategies of two of Sotorra's latest feature films, Game Over and Commander Arian, documentaries with which the filmmaker aims at overcoming the visual exploitation of alterity. After an introduction to Sotorra, and a brief revision of the theory of postcolonial feminist cinema, our argument unfolds in four parts. Firstly, we reflect on cinematic representations of women and men at war; secondly, we introduce our methodology, based on in-depth interviews with the director to support our film analysis; thirdly, we contrast our hypotheses by means of close-readings of the films; lastly, we reflect on how the filmmaker aligns herself with intersectional feminism by using empathy and solidarity towards her subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents books written by authors with a emphasis on the culture of public credit while excoriating it in favor of the landed interest. "The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject," by Peter De Bolla; "Writings and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century," by Colin Nicholson; "Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel," by James Thompson.

The article reviews the book "Reconsidering Eusebius: Collected Papers on Literary, Historical and Theological Issues" edited by Sabrina Inowlocki and Claudio Zamagni.

During the summer of 2006, over four hundred Catholic ethicists from around the world gathered for four days in Padua, Italy. About sixty of the conference papers have become available in two edited collections, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: The Plenary Papers from the First Cross-cultural Conference on Catholic Theological Ethics, and Applied Ethics in a World Church: The Padua Conference. As the conference was marked by a distinctive and creative tension-between the diversity which characterized the nationalities and cultural identities of the participants, on the one hand, and the commonness of their religious heritage, on the other-these essays can tell us much about contemporary Catholic ethics in its response to global pluralism. The following develops four reflections. First, the conference papers pursue a style of scholarship that is at once critically creative and ecclesially rooted. Second, the conference raises new concerns about the importance that Christian formation must have in a pluralist world. Third, the participants affirm and defend the ultimate universality of moral goods while also arguing that these goods are expressed and embodied in unavoidably particular ways. Finally, the most important contribution that Catholic ethics can make to public conversations about issues of common concern is through its articulation and defense of key human values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Studies in Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology: Papers in Honour of Martin G. Welch" edited by Stuart Brookes, Sue Harrington and Andrew Reynolds.

The article reviews the book "The Silk Road: Key Papers: The Pre-Islamic Period," edited by Valerie Hansen.

The Western gaze instituted by the cinematographic apparatus constructs racialized subjects and supports processes of dispossession. My present transmedial artistic research project engages with the biopolitics of representation in archival film material, from a decolonial perspective. By drawing from academic and non-academic sources on relations between colonialism, capitalism, and technologies of control, this paper studies manifestations of surveillance in non-fiction film, to analyze the sub-genre of medical propaganda in former European colonies. Moreover, it proposes to scrutinize the long-term impact colonial cinema and its structures of representation had and still have on processes of subjectification, haunting present-day gender and race-determined profiling by mainstream film, CCTV, and drones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten an deutschen Universitäten" by Schäfer and Heinrich has been published in its second edition and is specifically aimed at foreign students in the humanities and social sciences. It provides practical assistance with exercises and fills a gap in the literature on academic work, as it is explicitly targeted at foreign students. The book covers various aspects of academic work, such as note-taking, presenting, and writing a written academic paper. It also includes exercises and examples to help students. Although the book has some shortcomings, it can be recommended as long as there is no better work available for the target audience. [Extracted from the article]

The article reviews the book "How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper" by Robert Day and Barbara Gastel.

This paper addresses the gap between familiar popular narratives describing Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as the trope of the killer robot, and the realistic near-future implications of machine intelligence and automation for technology policy and society. The authors conducted a series of interviews with technologists, science fiction writers, and other experts, as well as a workshop, to identify a set of key themes relevant to the near future of AI. In parallel, they led the analysis of almost 100 recent works of science fiction stories with AI themes to develop a preliminary taxonomy of AI in science fiction. These activities informed the commissioning of six original works of science fiction and non-fiction response essays on the themes of "intelligence" and "justice" that were published as part of the Slate Future Tense Fiction series in 2019 and 2020. Our findings indicate that artificial intelligence remains deeply ambiguous both in the policy and cultural contexts: we struggle to define the boundaries and the agency of machine intelligence, and consequently find it difficult to govern or interact with such systems. However, our findings also suggest more productive avenues of inquiry and framing that could foster both better policy and better narratives around AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison: A Biography" by Martin E. Marty.