The Lovers of Venice: Musset’s Works and Life in Kuzmin’s A New Rolla

The title of Mikhail Kuzmin’s Novyi Rolla [A New Rolla] has been considered cryptic despite its evident allusion to Alfred de Musset’s “Rolla,” a poem with which it shares little. In this article I argue that the link to Musset is clear if we read A New Rolla as responding not just to “Rolla,” but also to Musset’s novel La Confession d’un enfant du siècle [The Confession of a Child of the Age] and his biography. From this composite source Kuzmin takes up the themes of a debauchee finding love, love as serial yet serious, and a love triangle in Venice, as well as an apostrophe to the kiss. Kuzmin endorses most of Musset’s idea of love, but rejects the egalitarian ideal implicit in the sympathetic treatment of the prostitute Marion in “Rolla.” A secondary allusion to Nikolai Nekrasov’s “Kogda iz mraka zabluzhden’ia” [When, out of the darkness of error] reinforces Kuzmin’s rejection of the egalitarian ideal of sexual love. The allusions to Musset and Nekrasov amount to anachronisms that partially undermine the precise temporal setting of A New Rolla. Kuzmin’s work thereby occupies an intermediate position among his period pieces, as it is neither openly playful like Venetsianskie bezumtsy [Venetian Madcaps] nor constructed with its seams hidden like the Aleksandriiskie pesni [Alexandrian Songs].     

Holding a looking-glass to the ‘Movement’: A response to Worth and Abbott

This article explores the presence of US institutions of higher education in Eastern Europe as one facet of the neoliberal global environment. It draws on policy documents, institutional statistics, materials produced by interest groups and NGOs, official mission statements, press releases and media coverage, and personal narratives. The American University in Bulgaria is examined as a case of this wider phenomenon. Exclusively structuralist, critical analyses of such institutions can easily lead to conclusions of homogenization and dominance through the hegemony of ‘exporter’ education institutions and programs. Post-structural analysis—attuned to multiplicities of meanings, nuances of context, and complex interplays of power and knowledge claims—allow for more attention to the local dynamics, while human interpretation and agency may point the way to more hopeful roles for US institutions of higher education abroad. In turn, these roles may challenge the one-way deterministic flow of influence suggested by structuralist analyses.

Este artículo indaga la presencia de las instituciones de E.E.U.U. de educación superior en Europa oriental, como una faceta del medioambiente neoliberal global. Se sirve de documentos de política, estadística institucional, materiales producidos bajo grupos de interés y ONGs, declaraciones de emisiones oficiales sobre los objetivos, comunicados de prensa y cobertura de los medios y testimonios personales. Se ha examinado a la Universidad Americana en Bulgaria como un caso de este amplio fenómeno. Los análisis críticos de tales instituciones exclusivamente estructuralistas, pueden conducir fácilmente a unas conclusiones de homogenización y dominio a través de la hegemonía de instituciones de educación y programas ‘exportados’. Un análisis estructural a posteriori—adaptado a una multiplicidad de significados y matices de contexto, y las interacciones complejas de afirmaciones de poder y conocimiento—permite mayor atención a la dinámica local, mientras que la interpretación y la actividad humana pueden señalar el camino para que las instituciones de educación superior de los E.E.U.U., logren papeles más esperanzadores en el extranjero. A su vez, estos papeles pueden desafiar la corriente determinista de influencia de una sola vía, como lo sugiere el análisis estructural.

本文探讨了美国高等教育机构作为全球新自由主义环境的一个侧面在东欧的存在。本文根据政策文件、机构统计数据、利益团体和非政府组织提供的资料、正式使命声明、新闻稿和媒体报道,以及个人记述写成,以位于保加利亚的美利坚大学作为这一更广泛现象的个案进行了考察。作为一种完全的结构主义,对这些机构的批判性分析很容易得出通过“出口”教育机构和各种项目的霸权实现同质化、获取支配力的结论。后结构主义分析——切合多重意义,语境的微妙变化,以及权力与知识的宣称之间复杂的相互作用——使人们更多地关注当地的动力学,而人的解释及动因可能为海外美国高等教育机构发挥更加充满希望的作用指明方向。反过来,这些角色可能挑战结构主义分析所提出的影响流的单向决定性。     

The parallel power in organizations’ defense: Exploring faith-holders and their crisis communication

Publics can be active participants of discussions around organizational crises. Through digital media, they can provide information about a crisis, criticize crisis participants or defend the organization experiencing the crisis (Coombs & Holladay, 2014). Limited research exists on the active role of publics in defending the organization. A handful of studies have looked at crisis communication of active organization supporters, including faith-holders (Luoma-aho, 2015); however there is a limited amount of public relations scholarship about the nature of faith-holders, their communication under crisis circumstances, and whether they in fact attempt to help organizations in times of crisis. By using a combination of content analysis and rhetorical analysis, this paper examined the crisis communication strategies offered by the organization’s faith-holders in the comments to the crisis-related articles published on the websites of media outlets. Through a case study of Tesla Motors’ crisis, the paper determined that faith-holders are a powerful force in defending the organization during the crisis, using both traditional reputation repair strategies identified by Coombs (2015) as well as new strategies identified by the study. Faith-holders were not a monolithic group and differed in terms of what aspects of the organization they had faith. Their communication was not restricted by legal and ethical demands. The results provide insights into understanding of faith-holders’ communication during crises, and also highlight the need for reconsidering the situational crisis communication theory in respect to organizations' faith-holders.     

Prestige in social dilemmas: A network analytic approach to cooperation among Bogotá’s art organizations

What brings about cooperation in social dilemmas? The literature has proposed motivational and strategic solutions to social dilemmas. In motivational solutions, actors cooperate because they care about fairness. In strategic solutions actors cooperate because their chances to exploit others are reduced. This paper argues that actors also cooperate in order to gain prestige. The effect of prestige on cooperation is examined relying on a unique set of network and covariate data on art organizations (museums, independent art spaces, galleries and art foundations) in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. Bogotá is a not a very likely environment for cooperation, since distrust is still widespread after a long civil war. The temporal exponential random graph models predict dyadic cooperation (i.e., between two actors) based on past and present cooperation in the network as well as of the organizations’ characteristics. The analysis thus controls for the effect of actors’ past and present interaction on the present cooperation dilemma. The paper shows that prestige affects cooperation in social dilemmas independent of past and present interactions.     

Silver economy: opportunities and challenges to Brazil adopt the European Union’s strategy

This paper deals with the construction of the silver economy (or the longevity economy) strategy in Brazil and its contribution to the economic development. The first and second parts of the paper summarize the international debate on the concept, mainly in the countries of the European Union. The third part approaches the focus on the ageing population in Brazil, still dominated by a pessimistic view. In the next section of the paper, the action opportunities for the longevity saving strategy in Brazil are exposed with summaries of some key sectors, according to the international literature on the silver economy. The income of the older people and the purchasing power of families with older adults are analysed in the following sections. In the conclusion, some recommended actions for building the silver economy strategy in Brazil is discussed.     

The ‘Bakul Gendong’ as a communication strategy to reject the construction of a cement factory in Central Java

Since 2006, one of Indonesia’s biggest corporations operating in the cement industry has been trying to build a factory at Sukolilo village in Central Java, Indonesia. The potential for of environmental damage caused by mining and the construction of this new factory is the main source of conflict between the public and the giant corporation.The focus of this research was the communication strategy adopted by women in the community to reject the construction of the cement factory in Pati, Central Java, Indonesia. This research used a qualitative method through a case study approach. Interviews, observations, and literature studies were used as data collection techniques for in this research.We found that the practices of the “Bakul Gendong” communication strategy were effective in developing women’s awareness of environmental issues based on the values they believe in. Through the women peddlers, women’s awareness of the risk of environmental damage caused by the cement factories was successfully developed. They also created female farmers’ group named “Simbar Wareh” to strengthen cooperation between them and to better-organize their resistance. The women’s movement to resist the cement factory was also conducted by building a network, meeting authorities, demonstrating, displaying traditional symbols during celebrations such as the “Agustusan” (independence day celebration) and Kartinian (women’s day) as their sites of resistance. The local government and PT. Semen Gresik tended to use technical and economical communicative approaches, while the people mainly refer to local know how PT. Semen Gresik did not use the right communication strategy to understand the conflict that arose and how to handle it, until after 10 years of trying to build a factory in Sukolilo.     

A Portrait of America’s Children: The Impact of Poverty and a Call to Action

The responsibility for children's services is disseminated between a multitude of advocacy organizations, social service agencies, and numerous departments within our government. A lack of conceptual integration and fiscal commitment is evident at the federal, state, and local levels. The examination of poverty and children's lack of economic security, inadequate medical care, homelessness, and nutrition inadequacies reveals a portrait of America's children that is both unsettling and alarming. The paper concludes with a call for action and the commitment that will be required to rectify this problem.     

Institutional crisis assessment and mission-driven response in practice: One religious-affiliated university’s response to the Catholic priest sexual abuse and cover up crisis

An institutional crisis occurs when individuals and organizations fail to perform the routines and roles that produce the collective interests and social order of the institution. The institution of the Catholic Church continues to endure a crisis of priest sexual abuse and those in positions of leadership covering up these incidents. The crisis reached another eruption point in 2018 when a Pennsylvania grand jury produced a report that documented these crimes. Any organization within the institution could proactively decide that it must respond to maintain its credibility, while also helping repair the reputation of the institution. A response to an institutional crisis should be driven by an organization’s assessment of events as well as its mission, values, and sense of responsibility to its stakeholders. The response should also use the unique skill and resource capabilities of the organization. This case study focuses on the response of one religious-affiliated university that was prompted by the Pennsylvania grand jury report. The appeal of studying a religious-affiliated university is that it serves dual missions: that as part of the larger religious institution and that of a higher education institution. In response to this institutional crisis, the university has a focus on victims’ concerns from the religious mission perspective and is using its capabilities of amassing and disseminating knowledge from the higher education mission perspective.     

Recruitment of foreign male and female fighters to Jihad: Morocco’s multifaceted counter-terror strategy

Field research on ‘young Moroccan Jihadists in Syria and Iraq from northern Morocco’ unexpectedly revealed the mundane factors behind their recruitment represented in the self-realization and the search for heroism, adventure and money, were the main reasons for the recruitment of young people in northern Morocco terrorist organizations, especially the Daesh. The religious factor is secondary. To combat terrorism and extremism which is spreading in the MENA region requires political will. Appropriate laws should be enacted as soon as possible and policies must be implemented to ensure border control, the closure of financing ports, propaganda platforms, anti-addiction, etc.     

The Relationship Between Wife’s Education and Husband’s Earnings: Evidence from 1960 to 2000

Previous research finds a positive relationship between a wife’s education and her husband’s earnings using data from the 1960s. Earlier theories suggest that benefits accrue from informational sharing between partners in a marriage. This paper tests the hypothesis that a wife’s education is positively associated with her husband’s earnings, using data from the 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses. Between 1960 and 2000, the educational attainment and labor-force participation of married women has increased dramatically. As women have embarked upon their own careers, has their education continued to be positively associated with their husbands’ earnings? Yes. The coefficient of the wife’s education remains positive and significant for all the years under study. The size of the coefficient decreases, however, from 1960 to 2000.     

Antipolitics and Counterpolitics in Nepal’s Civil Society: The Case of Nepal’s Citizens’ Movement

This article considers the relationship of civil society to the domain of the political from the actors’ perspectives. It explores the attempt by a citizens’ movement (CMDP) in Nepal to construct new political realities in the context of the autocratic regime of king Gyanendra and then during the democratic transition. This was, paradoxically, to be achieved through the construction of an apolitical space. Theoretically, this production of apoliticality by civil society actors shows that civil society is not only implicated in the expansion of what is understood as ‘political’ but also in setting its boundaries. The broader aims of the article are to contribute to the ethnography of civil society and to add to current understandings of the relationship of actually existing civil societies to the political domain. Practically, it argues that debates over whether civil society is or is not political in the Nepal case and normative positions within development circles that it should not be political are misconceived since civil society is a site for the production of both politicality and apoliticality.     

A Bionian Approach to the Body and the Feminine in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance

ABSTRACT

This psychoanalytic study of Performance (directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970) explores the importance of the bodily, sensorial, and material aspects of a pivotal moment in the development of the protagonist’s sexual identity and considers how this moment has been conceived as being dependent on a certain containing function that is performed by a female character. Drawing on Bionian and post-Bionian theory, the article proposes that this containing function is fundamentally feminine. The feminine function of Bion’s concept of container is one that has been discussed especially in the theorization of the roles performed by the mother and the analyst. This article aims to investigate the importance of the bodily and the feminine aspects of the container as part of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of psychical growth as they present themselves in this film.     

Is Strategic Communication too important to be left to Communication Professionals?: Managers’ and coworkers’ attitudes towards strategic communication and communication professionals

The article is based upon empirical data from a Swedish three-year research project entitled “Communicative Organizations”, investigating the value of communication for organizations. The project is involves eleven organizations. Based upon empirical data from a quantitative survey (n = 6486) the perceived value of strategic communication and communication professionals, mainly among managers and co-workers, is analyzed. Two conceptual models are used for analysis: the communicative organization and the four-by-four model of strategic public relations. The results shows that the self-identity of communication professionals and the normative model of strategic public relations partly mirror and partly collide with the perceptions of managers and coworkers. The study confirms that managers and coworkers find communication crucial for their organizations at a strategic level, but that the role of communication professionals is rather unclear. A majority of the respondents do not understand the core role or roles of communication professionals.     

Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter: belonging and the transnationality of home in older age

ABSTRACT

Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a fictional account of a Chinese American woman and her mother, a first-generation migrant, who is negotiating dementia in later life. Analysis of diasporic novels can provide insight into migrant belonging, especially the emotional geographies of home and emotional subjectivities of ageing that are not commonly or easily elucidated even by qualitative interviewing methods. This article examines Tan’s construction of ageing as an intergenerational, cultural and emotional process, and highlights the role of storytelling as an everyday home-making practice through which the transnationality of home in older age becomes evident.     

A Midsummer Night’s Coup: Performance and Power in Turkey’s July 15 Coup Attempt

Occurring at a time when military interventions appeared to be a matter of the past, the coup attempt of July 15, 2016 left a major mark on Turkish society and politics. This article approaches the July 15 coup attempt as a contingent and transformative event and investigates how symbolic processes helped determine its immediate outcome as well as its cultural, social, and political consequences. Linking the sociological literature on events with social performance theory, the study argues that the putschists’ ineffectiveness in projecting legitimacy and power in the critical hours of the coup attempt significantly contributed to its failure. The retrospective construction of an authoritative “Narrative of July 15” in the following weeks, on the other hand, enabled the government to implement specific institutional changes in the cultural, economic, and political domains. The study proposes a two-step analysis for the cultural construction of political events and suggests that social performance theory provides useful analytical tools for tracing the course and explaining the outcome of this process.     

On Moralism and Ethics: Associations to Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

Henry Abelove (1986) writes that Freud was troubled by what he saw as moralistic leanings pervading the theory and practice of early American psychoanalysis. Drawing on Erikson’s (1976) distinction between moralism and ethics, my associations to Abelove’s still very timely paper explore the psychological “deals” we all tend to make between moralism and ethics. I begin with Freud’s less than progressive views of female homosexuality. I then focus on the way that what I have called normative unconscious processes enter contemporary theory and practice. I draw attention to a continued presence in our theories of a straight/gay binary (which, according to Abelove, Freud contested), and I give an example of the effects of an unconscious adherence to neoliberal cultural norms. I conclude with the suggestion that, although fraught, it is nonetheless crucial to think about what is “the good.”     

Social Mobilization and Political Representation: The Women’s Movement’s Struggle for Legal Abortion in Uruguay

This article analyzes the political process leading to the recent legalization of abortion in Uruguay, underlying the multiple strategies resorted to by the women’s movement to create a social consensus around women’s rights—and, more generally, around sexual and reproductive rights—as belonging to the realm of human rights. It seeks to identify the main reasons accounting for the movement’s success, which appear to be connected to the breadth of its repertoire of actions, progressively expanded to include various (and sometimes innovative) strategies operating in both the realm of civil society and public opinion and the sphere of political institutions and political representation. Focusing on the dyad speech action, the article examines the movement’s broadened repertoire of actions as well as its discourse setting human rights as a horizon of legitimacy in the context of a cultural war against a countermovement organized in defense of the status quo. Last but not least, it analyzes the issues pertaining to political representation brought to the forefront by the clashes, discrepancies, and disconnections between social movement and political institutions.     

The European right to be forgotten: A challenge to the United States Constitution’s First Amendment and to professional public relations ethics

This paper explains how the European right to be forgotten violates the free flow of information in society, as evidenced by conflicts with the United States Constitution and ethical principles of professional communicators worldwide. As Europe imposes new data protection laws and incorporates the right to be forgotten that promotes censorship through search engine de-linking, United States constitutional law scholars ponder the implications of World Wide Web censorship, while journalists and public relations professionals struggle to understand how accurate transparent communication could occur in an ecosystem that allows for arbitrary information removal and the creation of memory holes. This article explains why the European notion of the right to be forgotten challenges U.S. constitutional law and professional public relations ethics, imperiling the online marketplace of ideas and eroding disclosure of information. The European Data Protection Directive and recent right to be forgotten movements directly conflict with the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and professional communications ethics codes. The First Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights indicates the specific rights of citizens to freedom from government intervention into freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Recent actions by Google to honor European requests to remove data upon request collide with First Amendment theoretical concepts and contemporary constitutional law. Both the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) construct ethical principles for members that call for the active promotion of the free flow of information and the ethical disclosure of information. The European Data Protection Directive’s right to be forgotten silences these core professional communication ethics and more significantly imperils the robust information exchange in a global society, ultimately altering the discourse and debate in democratic countries. This paper addresses the status of the right to be forgotten in the United States and indicates how adopting such a provision in the United States would violate First Amendment theories, as evidenced by the Marketplace of Ideas Theory, the Meiklejohnian Theory, and the Absolutist Theory, and would counter traditional public relations ethics codes, conducted in a context of dialogic ethics that calls for adherence to core values advocating for transparency, disclosure, and free flow of information.