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African architecture has historically been subjected to variants of appropriation and materialisation with multifarious effects on identity formation. In particular, its forced engagement with colonial powers followed by relatively repressive post-colonial regimes, left legacies of multi-layered elitist and totalitarian inscriptions. This article critically reviews the ways in which Zimbabwean iconic architecture has come about and how it produces identities. It specifically considers ancient, modern and postmodern architecture namely state owned and controlled buildings, museums and monuments, statues and cityscapes. The article argues that the various forms of architectural re-figuration do not necessarily signify collective historic memorialisation, heritage preservation and national identity formation but are part of a hegemonic statecraft. It concludes that power has significantly transformed iconic architecture into memory dispositifs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today there is a wealth of data available detailing the climate impact of our actions, including the ${\rm CO}_2$ CO 2 emissions from academic flying. Despite this, such data is hard to engage with in the abstract, leading to little practical action. In this paper, we investigate how to support processes of collectively working through and making sense of environmental data about academic flying through data physicalisation. Drawing on the results from a series of workshops with stakeholders at our own university, in which we have designed and deployed a data physicalisation of flight data, we describe this process and discuss lessons learned with a focus on material, engagement with data and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical drug studies explore the discursive and material dimensions of sexualised drug use to overcome individualised and often pathologising notions such as risk, safety, responsibility and pleasure. This article uses an object-oriented approach—following the use and flow of social apps, syringes and antiretroviral therapy (ART)—to analyse gay and bisexual Taiwanese men's drug practices. Interview data from fourteen men are used to articulate how objects were brought into gay and bisexual men's chemsex repertoire in ways that shaped individuals' safe-sex communication, intimacy maintenance and stigma negotiation. An object-oriented approach scrutinises risk, pleasure and identities in assemblages of the human and nonhuman, and can help identify new opportunities for implementing health promotion interventions and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strut-type hybrid system can be made in different geometric shapes, which are affected by: the number and arrangement of struts, the shape and position of the cable in relation to the girder, and the size and shape of the cross-section of the girder. When choosing a system, all the listed parameters can vary geometrically, which has consequences on the behaviour of the girder when carrying the load by directly affecting the change in the stiffness of the system. In addition to the geometric parameters, the stiffness of the hybrid system is affected by variations in the properties of the incorporated materials and their mutual relations. In this paper, based on a detailed parametric analysis, the principles of design, the choice of materialisation, and the possibility of further optimisation of the persistent-type hybrid systems are given, with the aim of additionally increasing the load capacity and reducing the deformability. The results of this research are presented in the form of general expressions and diagrams, which can be applied with sufficient accuracy in practice when choosing the form and materialisation of the hybrid system, as well as the possibility of further optimisation of the system by applying pre-stressing. Using the example of external pre-stressing of a glued laminated timber girder, with the assumption of ensuring the lateral stability of the system, the results of the analysis of the behaviour of such a system under load in real conditions, i.e. the influence of the environment and changes in material properties, are given.

This paper highlights the role of materiality in legitimising art organising as occurs at festivals and performances. Through ethnographic fieldwork pertaining to art events and projects, we documented how legitimacy is accomplished through the very performance of art. We observed that artistic practices materialise the very norms by which they are assessed and demarcate a normative space of their own. Our paper contributes to the research on legitimacy by showing that it takes place through connection with societal norms and also through a disconnection that fosters such a distinct space. Legitimation thus corresponds to configuring the specific situation where the actions under scrutiny are legitimate; it is a continuous process that is accomplished not for but with an audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visibility is a capacity to be seen by others directly or through images and can be defined as a total social fact, which includes different domains of collective life. As Italian sociologist Andrea Mubi Brighenti argues, visibility is a form of “visuality at large” and the visible entails more than the visual, more than the sensorially perceptible, which becomes clear when we consider the fact that the visual itself needs to be visibilised, and examine the ways in which this happens. In the last decades visibility in a social sphere and media was largely “capitalised”. According to French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, the visibility capitalis firmly entrenched within Western society, culture and media. Non-material capital of visibility differs from other non-material symbolical or cultural capitals in Bourdieusian sense. This new phenomenon includes all features of classical material capital. The capital of visibility is measurable, accumulated, transmissible, earning interest and convertible. It can be measured by number of fans, showing results in Google search, number of views in YouTube, number of followers in social media Instagram, Facebook or number of images in other mass media.

All societies around the world have both intangible and tangible cultures. Material culture is part of the tangible culture. Among the Shona people, there exists a lot of material cultures evident in their homes and surroundings. Some critics will point out that culture by its nature is dynamic, so is material culture, making it difficult if not impossible to capture the entirety of a people's material culture in a short study like the current one. In the study, while I concur with such a submission, I focus on a pastoralist and peasant group of the Shona material culture. This group makes up the majority. Some material culture that is predominantly rural finds its way into urban areas. Therefore, it is proper for the study to focus on a pastoralist and peasant group. The thrust of the article is that to fully understand the Shona people, their philosophy, psychology and sociology there is a need, in part, to understand their material culture. The study contends that it is through the Shona people's material culture that we better understand them. The moment one understands people, the better one can assist them to further develop themselves. Developmental strategies and policies that ignore people's material culture, which is indeed an outward expression of their philosophy, are likely to falter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memorials are used to permanently mark important events, preserve memories of prominent personalities, nurture human ideals and cultural and historical traditions, and pay tribute to freedom fighters, civilian victims of war and mass suffering. Recognition, preservation and popularization of the original tangible and intangible message of monuments and memorials is a professional obligation of all those who deal with the valorization of cultural heritage in various ways. Different types of memorials: monuments, memorial plaques, memo- rial busts, memorial houses, memorial tombs, places of mass executions and other memorials, as materialized memories of important personalities and events, largely depict value patterns and social circumstances of the period in which they were erected, as well as the artistic achievements and craftsmanship of those who shaped them. Monuments and memorials are witness- es of our turbulent history, memory of heroic deeds, significant historical events and personalities. The special feature of the memorials is their spirit- ual value in terms of preserving the memory of their dedication, and for the most of these memorials, it is the legacy of the Thirteenth of July Uprising and the entire National Liberation War. Their authorial, artistic and architectural value is also special. As such, these memorials represent an extreme- ly important segment of the state‘s cultural heritage. In accordance with the passing time, the social and cultural attitude towards memorials is evolving and changing. The erection of the monuments is becoming part of the urban transformation of the city, especially during the past few decades, but also due to more intensive international cooperation. The fmemorials were introduced into the Register of Cultural Monuments of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments as: „monuments of the People‘s Revolution”, „monuments of the National Liberation War”, „monuments from the First World War”, „monumentss from the Balkan Wars”, „Sculpture” and others. The first law regulating the issue of memorials was passed in 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the very beginning of his writing career, Samuel Beckett has been emphatically preoccupied with the representation of the body in his works; a theme that has been extensively discussed by Beckett criticism and one that has been approached in many different ways. This article examines how the notion of embodiment is treated in Beckett's late prose work Worstward Ho (1983), a work which quite evidently deals with ideas and images of impotence, abstraction and reduction evident in the representations of the body, the subject and language within it. Looking at this work closely, the article argues that Worstward Ho is not an abstention from meaning and its materialisation, but one that paradoxically foregrounds that 'something' which remains an essential part of it, that is, embodied subjectivity. The question as to whether literature can ever eliminate its 'material' dimension is raised while, looking closely at the way in which the centrality and the necessity of the somatic manifests itself specifically in Beckett's 'abstractive' language and images of impotence, the article, in light of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception, demonstrates the work's very resistance to any reduction of the human to a purely disembodied consciousness or voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings from a study conducted in Brazil among doctors specialised in the treatment of sexual problems. Its focus is on medical treatments and approaches related to female sexuality. According to the accounts provided by professionals, the most common 'problem' they encountered among women was lack of sexual desire in the period around menopause. In line with current principles of sexual medicine, they concurred that this issue resulted from declining hormone production. This paper discusses how pharmaceutical treatments have facilitated the materialisation of female desire in terms of the presence or absence of testosterone, paradoxically the hormone most commonly associated with masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of yoga has grown globally in the past 20 years, with professionals, publications and practitioners furthering it as a way to improve physical and mental health, reduce stress, lead a more conscious and productive life and experience mental and physical wellbeing. Widely regarded as a practice 'for all', yoga questions the authority of norms and practices produced by institutionalised religions, Western biomedicine and sports, tracing the foundations of a personal and collective politics of the body. This discourse of accessibility - integral to the way yoga is marketed today - is the point of departure for a sociological perspective on contemporary yoga. By inscribing itself in a seemingly countercultural ethics of and from the body, yoga is entangled in the relations of power in which bodies are immersed. In that respect, gendered configurations are crucial to the way the body of yoga participates in tracing corporeal, spatial, social and cultural boundaries. Feminist reflections on corporeality can unravel the workings of power exercised by and upon bodies, calling into question the very processes through which they operate in contemporary yoga practices. Crucial to this approach is the tension between the fixity of corporeal normativity and the experience of movement, change and transformation that underscores the practice of yoga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pleasure is often a key feature of school physical education (PE) and, indeed, a lot of students find pleasure in and through PE while others do not. However, pleasure is rarely considered to be of educational value in the subject [Pringle, R. (2010). “Finding Pleasure in Physical Education: A Critical Examination of the Educative Value of Positive Movement Affects.”Quest62: 119–134]. Further, since pleasure is linked to power [Foucault, M. (1980).Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon; Gerdin, G., and R. Pringle. (2015). “The Politics of Pleasure: An Ethnographic Examination Exploring the Dominance of the Multi-Activity Sport-Based Physical Education Model.”Sport, Education and Society. doi:10.1080/13573322.2015.1019448] it is in fact not entirely straightforward to legitimise the educational value of PE in relation to pleasure. Purpose: In this paper, we explore how a group of boys derive pleasures from their involvement in PE, but also how these power-induced pleasures are integral to gender normalisation processes. The findings presented are particularly discussed in terms of inclusive/exclusive pedagogical practices related to gender, bodies and pleasures. Research setting and participants: The research setting was a single-sex, boys’ secondary school in Auckland, New Zealand. Participants in this study were 60 Year 10 (age 14–15) students from two PE classes. Data collection and analysis: Using a visual ethnographic approach [Pink, S. (2007).Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage] involving observations and video recordings of boys participating in PE, the boys’ representations and interpretations of the visual data were explored during both focus groups and individual interviews. The data were analysed using (a visually oriented) discourse analysis [Foucault, M. (1998). “Foucault.” InMichel Foucault. Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by J. D. Faubion, 459–463. New York: The New Press; Rose, G. (2007).Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage]. Findings: By elucidating the discursive practices of PE in this setting and employing (Butler, J. (1993).Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge] concept of ‘materialisation’, we suggest that boy’s bodies materialise as productive and pleasurable or displeasurable bodies through submitting/subjecting to certain bodily regimes, developing embodied mastery when it comes to certain sports, and displaying bodies in particular ways. The analysis indicate that the discursive practices of PE contribute to boys’ bodies materialising as pleasurable or displeasurable and the (re)production of gender in the subject as shaped by discourse and the productive effect of power. Discussion and conclusions: In line with [Gard, M. (2008). “When a Boy’s Gotta Dance: New Masculinities, Old Pleasures.”Sport, Education and Society13 (2): 181–193], we conclude that the focus on certain discursively constructed bodily practices at the same time continues to restrict the production of a diversity of bodily movement pleasures. Hence, traditional gender patterns are reproduced through a selection of particular sports/physical activities that all the students are expected to participate in. We propose that the ongoing constitution of privileged forms of masculinity, masculine bodies and masculine pleasures as related to fitness, health and sport and (certain) boys’ subsequent exercise of power in PE needs further critical examination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the 'normal' one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing 'wealth'. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the 'commons' on which shared prosperity depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Due to the Semantic Web's decentralised nature, ontology engineers rarely know all applications that leverage their ontology. Consequently, they are unaware of the full extent of possible consequences that changes might cause to the ontology. Our goal is to lessen the gap between ontology engineers and users by investigating ontology engineers' understanding of ontology changes' impact at editing time. Hence, this paper introduces the Protégé plugin ChImp which we use to reach our goal. We elicited requirements for ChImp through a questionnaire with ontology engineers. We then developed ChImp according to these requirements and it displays all changes of a given session and provides selected information on said changes and their effects. For each change, it computes a number of metrics on both the ontology and its materialisation. It displays those metrics on both the originally loaded ontology at the beginning of the editing session and the current state to help ontology engineers understand the impact of their changes. We investigated the informativeness of materialisation impact measures, the meaning of severe impact, and also the usefulness of ChImp in an online user study with 36 ontology engineers. We asked the participants to solve two ontology engineering tasks – with and without ChImp (assigned in random order) – and answer in-depth questions about the applied changes as well as the materialisation impact measures. We found that ChImp increased the participants' understanding of change effects and that they felt better informed. Answers also suggest that the proposed measures were useful and informative. We also learned that the participants consider different outcomes of changes severe, but most would define severity based on the amount of changes to the materialisation compared to its size. The participants also acknowledged the importance of quantifying the impact of changes and that the study will affect their approach of editing ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary medical imaging technologies produce images on the level of human cells. As a result of such images, egg and sperm cells have become well-known artefacts of popular culture. Medical imaging technology has transformed these gametes from invisible matter integrated in biological processes within the body to identifiable objects. The visualisation of egg and sperm cells has literally lifted the process of human reproduction out of the female body and made the gametes appear as protagonists in the story of human reproduction. The article argues that visualisation of the gametes and the central role they play in contemporary imaginations of reproduction may offer vital contributions to the rather rapid acceptance and normalisation of assisted reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last one of two decades, researchers within the physical education (PE) and sport pedagogy research frequently use the concept ‘the material body’. An initial purpose of this article is to explore what a concept of a ‘material body’ might mean. What other bodies are there? Who would dispute the materiality of bodies? I suggest that the use of a concept as ‘the material body’ suggests a hesitation before the radicalism of the linguistic turn in the sense that the concept ‘discourse’ does not include a material dimension. In this way ‘the material body’ relates to an interpretation of ‘the socially (or discursively) constructed body’ as void of matter. A further purpose with the article is to re-inscribe matter in the concept of ‘discourse’. This is done by way of discussing what theorists like Michel Foucault and, in particular, Judith Butler, has to say about the materiality of the body. In their writings, discourse should not be limited to spoken and/or written language. Rather, discourse is understood in terms of actions and events that create meanings—that matters. One conclusion of the article is that it is important to problematise the mundane view of discourse as ‘verbal interchange’ because it reinforces the promise of an objective knowledge that will eventually shed light on the ‘real’ body and the mysteries of sexual difference, what its origins are, what causes it. Another conclusion is that the PE and sport pedagogy research should pay less attention to the body as an object (what it ‘is’), and pay more attention to how the body matters, and e.g. how movements make bodies matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Palo monte is an Afro-Cuban religion of Bantu origin. One of the prominent features of this ritual practice is that spirits of dead men mediate human action. Believing in their ability to influence human matters, the priest of palo monte, the palero, tries to make these spirits his allies. In order to establish a relationship with those beings, the worshipper has to go to the cemetery, find an abandoned tomb and seal a pact with the spirit of the dead who rests there. After digging him up and taking some parts of his skeleton, he brings them to his domestic sanctuary where he places them in a cauldron, the nganga. But this recipient is not a mere shelter for the spirit; it is its embodiment. Giving primacy to the nganga’s materiality, this paper will attempt to throw a new light on this object, which has been until now relegated by the scientific literature to the status of a mere artefact. Describing and analyzing the set of the operations leading to the composition of a nganga, this paper will reveal some of the logics governing palo monte’s religious practice and will show that this composition is about giving life and shape to a god.

Answering queries over large datasets extended with Datalog rules plays a key role in numerous data management applications, and it has been implemented in several highly optimised Datalog systems in both academic and commercial contexts. Many systems implement reasoning via materialisation , which involves precomputing all consequences of the rules and the dataset in a preprocessing step. Some systems also use incremental reasoning algorithms, which can update the materialisation efficiently when the input dataset changes. Such techniques allow queries to be processed without any reference to the rules, so they are often used in applications where the performance of query answering is critical. Existing materialisation and incremental reasoning techniques enumerate all possible ways to apply rules to the data in order to derive all relevant consequences. This, however, can be inefficient because derivations of rules commonly used in practice are redundant; for example, rules axiomatising a binary predicate as symmetric and transitive can have a cubic number of applications, yet they can derive at most a quadratic number of facts. Such redundancy can be a significant source of overhead in practice and can prevent Datalog systems from successfully processing large datasets. To address this issue, in this paper we present a novel framework for modular materialisation and incremental reasoning. Our key idea is that, for certain combinations of rules commonly used in practice, all consequences can be derived using specialised procedures that do not necessarily enumerate all possible rule applications. Thus, our framework supports materialisation and incremental reasoning via a collection of modules. Each module is responsible for deriving consequences of a subset of the program, by using either standard rule application or proprietary algorithms. We prove that such an approach is complete as long as each module satisfies certain properties. Our formalisation of a module is very general, and in fact it allows modules to keep arbitrary auxiliary information. We also show how to realise custom procedures for four types of modules: transitivity, symmetry–transitivity, chain rules, and sequencing elements of a total order. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that using our custom procedures can speed up materialisation and incremental reasoning by several orders of magnitude on several well-known benchmarks. Thus, our technique has the potential to significantly improve the scalability of Datalog reasoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in 'an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility' (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's 'philosophy-physics', Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its 'extraordinary liveliness' (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is 'embodied in the very worlding of the world' (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what 'the ethical' constitutes or should achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the prestige economy of a Transylvanian Roma ethnic subgroup known as the Gabors. It highlights how these Roma construct prestige items and symbols of ethnic identity by de- and re-contextualisation, that is, by commodity fetishism and symbolic re-creation of silver beakers and tankards purchased from non-Roma antique dealers, auction houses, museums etc. Focusing on a transitional period of the ‘social history’ of these objects, it analyses how the Gabors attach to them a new cultural identity (elite register of consumption of material goods) and new social identities (symbols of ethnic and patrilineal identity). These processes of ‘symbolic alchemy’ of objects play a significant role in the construction and materialisation of ethnic identity among the Gabors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on modernity and the issues that the creation of a museum of the contemporary world would bring up. According to the author, a selection of objects would not suffice to illustrate the present world. A possible way of showing modernity is presented, separating current events from technological innovations.

Abstract: To study societal and biophysical constraints on sustainability, we present an extension of the neoclassical growth model with two new concepts: allocation of natural capital and dematerialisation. We consider that anthropogenic environmental impact is correlated with the material throughput of the economy (materialisation) and that, due to composition change and innovation, this throughput can be reduced—the process of dematerialisation. We also consider that the allocation of natural capital to production negatively affects the endogenous dynamics of ecosystems, reducing the total amount of environmental services ecosystems provide. According to our model, it is possible to achieve unbounded economic growth by keeping the natural system in steady state. Balanced growth, however, is only possible for special parameter values. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Ontologies are becoming a key component of numerous applications and research fields. But knowledge captured within ontologies is not static. Some ontology updates potentially have a wide ranging impact; others only affect very localised parts of the ontology and their applications. Investigating the impact of the evolution gives us insight into the editing behaviour but also signals ontology engineers and users how the ontology evolution is affecting other applications. However, such research is in its infancy. Hence, we need to investigate the evolution itself and its impact on the simplest of applications: the materialisation. In this work, we define impact measures that capture the effect of changes on the materialisation. In the future, the impact measures introduced in this work can be used to investigate how aware the ontology editors are about consequences of changes. By introducing five different measures, which focus either on the change in the materialisation with respect to the size or on the number of changes applied, we are able to quantify the consequences of ontology changes. To see these measures in action, we investigate the evolution and its impact on materialisation for nine open biomedical ontologies, most of which adhere to the EL + + description logic. Our results show that these ontologies evolve at varying paces but no statistically significant difference between the ontologies with respect to their evolution could be identified. We identify three types of ontologies based on the types of complex changes which are applied to them throughout their evolution. The impact on the materialisation is the same for the investigated ontologies, bringing us to the conclusion that the effect of changes on the materialisation can be generalised to other similar ontologies. Further, we found that the materialised concept inclusion axioms experience most of the impact induced by changes to the class inheritance of the ontology and other changes only marginally touch the materialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]