الصفحة 1
الصفحة 1
Why Context Matters : Applications of Social Network Analysis
Many elements of our society are embedded in network structures in which actors depend on each other as well as the structural context of their actions. This is reflected by the wide use of concepts and terms of social network analysis, such as the concept of the small world, the strength of weak ties, opinion leaders, gatekeepers, viral marketing, terrorist networks, stakeholders and the like. This volume provides a sample of the broad range of research in which social network analysis can be fruitfully applied. Topics addressed include networks of academic hiring, epidemic dynamics of diseases in populations such as HIV/AIDS, flow of information, semantic networks of the internet, relationships in private and public spheres, patent authorship, paper citation, and networks in linguistic as well as political systems.
Urban Landscape Perspectives
Urban Landscape Perspectives explores how landscape terminology can be usefully brought into the urban debate. Articles in this book include theoretical reflections on the landscape as an eminently project-like figure. It argues for attention to be drawn to the landscape as the origin of the sense of man’s home and of the reasons for the city, as well as to the search for the primary elements of city construction, of its public sphere.
The Onlife Manifesto : Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era
What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition. ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency).
Religion in the public sphere : A comparative analysis of German, Israeli, American and International Law
How closely correlated should church and state be? May a state recognize or dignify the role and meaning of religion at all, and if so can it treat different religious groups differently? This book intends to answer these questions through a portrayal and comparison of various legal orders including those of Germany, Israel, France and the USA.
Public Opinion Polling in a Globalized World
Social research and opinion polls give people the opportunity to express their views regularly on different topics and provide an efficient way to measure public opinion. The purpose of this book is to illustrate how public opinion polling matters in politics, in the public sphere and more generally in our globalized economies. The book provides an international and up to date perspecive on public opinion polling. It is based on studies from more than 50 countries across the world and in-depth case studies from the United States; Canada, Germany, Great Britain, France, Norway, the Western Balkans, India, Indonesia, New Zealand and the Philippines.
Neo-Liberalism, Globalization and Human Capital Learning : Reclaiming Education for Democratic Citizenship
Throughout the world, neoliberalism functions to decouple learning from the most important elements of civic education, transforming education into training and students into consumers. Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Human Capital Learning is an enormously important book that reveals in painstaking detail how neoliberal ideology destroys critical education. But it does much more. It also provides the insights and tools for educators to both overcome the market-based attack on critical education and address schooling as a democratic public sphere and the classroom as a laboratory for the nurturing of critical agency and social responsibility. This dynamic book should stir a public outcry among concerned citizens and educators through out the globe.
Fundamental Trends in City Development
This book inquires into how the city can be re-established as the space of dialogue and communication, how the spatial conditions of the public sphere can be created and the city retrieved. And what the features might be of a city retrieved and restored to its citizens. The book adopts the concept of externity as an innovative element for the project for the city, a constituent feature of all those situations traditionally considered non-functional, therefore external, to our contemporary post-cities, which are consigned to us adrift through decomposition, genericity and segregation. We thus need to try to get the city to conserve and show its past even when not visible, and to continue nurturing the imagination of its inhabitants by urban action consisting perhaps of subtly improving their approach to the "void", the "small", to the past, the territory, in general, to all those spatial concepts which are in a sense external to our cultural worlds today, but which represent the most fertile material for the project for the city.
European E-Democracy in Practice
This book explores how digital tools and social media technologies can contribute to better participation and involvement of EU citizens in European politics. By analyzing selected representative e-participation projects at the local, national and European governmental levels, it identifies the preconditions, best practices and shortcomings of e-participation practices in connection with EU decision-making procedures and institutions
