The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011 was a complex event. It was a disaster of multiple dimensions, unleashing the linked forces of seismic shock, tsunami, and nuclear radiation. This confluence left a varied array of damage in its wake. The personal traumas of death and loss combined with the social trauma of ruptured families, the economic trauma resulting from the physical destruction, and the psychic trauma arising from an uncertain future. Such a complex disaster demands a multifaceted exploration into its nature, implications, and meaning. The essays in this collection cross academic and geographic boundaries to explore the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami from a wide range of perspectives and to apply the analytical and interpretive tools of multiple disciplines to the study of the disaster and the various forms of trauma it inflicted.

The XXV FilmForum Cinematic Medium Across World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibitions conference has been devoted to exploring the interrelations between moving images, the cinematic medium and other arts and media as seen through global exhibiting events, such as the Large International Exhibitions, the Universal Expositions and the world fairs throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The general aim has been to shed light on the meaningful interrelations between moving images, media and arts throughout modernity and postmodernity – which means encompassing the pre-cinema, cinema and post-cinema eras, with a specific focus on Universal Expositions. In fact, the Universal Expositions proved to be a crucial and privileged field of excavation and investigation on the emergence as well as on the fluctuant re-configurations of the moving images within the broad media environment of the modern era.

This book collects Adornian contributions on different trends, genres and artists belonging to the broad and complex and in-itself-articulated field of popular music. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Adorno’s death, this book aims to represent an important contribution for the international community of Adorno scholars and, additionally, for scholars of both philosophy and musicology in general, in order to assess and celebrate the persistent actuality of Adorno’s contribution to the understanding of popular music in the context of the dynamics and processes of the culture industry. But the book also aims to critically rethink some of the main concepts and themes of Adorno's influential philosophy of music and thus to develop it at a further level, also intersecting it with other philosophical perspectives or adapting it when necessary to the partially changed conditions of popular music in our time in comparison to his epoch.

This book aims to investigate the phenomenon of volunteering as a workfare event, as a synchronous rewriting of territorial policy and advocacy, according to the principles of risk and border. The two terms, as a solid sociological category, shed light on the material and semantic shift of European welfare. Beyond its contents, this book represents an important research experience of a complex European-wide survey network on the phenomenon of volunteering and a best practice of collaboration and cultural exchange between university researchers and men and women that work in the fi eld of social policies concretely and every day.

Philosophical News is the official publication of the European Society for Moral Philosophy. It is a semi-annual journal of philosophy born from the collaboration of a number of international scholars as well as an intense editorial effort. The aim of the journal is to promote research and reflection with special regard to the contemporary debate in all its different cultural manifestations.

After the 2018 Davos Declaration it’s been perceived as extremely urgent a return to urban transformation practices linked with cultural values. What does this mean? What kind of values should designers, planners, and public administrators put at the center of their decision-making process? We have developed these questions with the help of scholars, architects, and thinkers, with a focus on the way in which the fruitful encounter between human sciences and architecture could address this challenge - the latest issue of Intertwining is the result of this debate. Intertwining is the first architectural magazine to explore the intersections between the humanities and the empirical sciences,especially between the “art of building” (Baukunst) and cognitive neuroscience.

This is a book about how the worlds of design and activism (could) inspire each other. As Design and its conceptual, functional, aesthetic, speculative and interventional concepts inevitably affect our lives, it often actively interferes in common definitions, understandings and opinion making, which offers opportunities for ideological engagement (in a good or in a bad sense). The book focuses on theories and practices related to the role of Design in terms of addressing, provoking and creating political discourse. Starting from traditional forms of protest, visual languages of resistance, to new forms of digital participation, this will help us to better understand the rituals, structures and meanings of design activism in history and the present, clarifying that design is intrinsically social and supremely political. And it shall help us to derive arguments and examples for the transformative potential of future design (and) activism.

In past years, Miquel Barceló has been depicted in various and yet contrasting ways, including the new Picasso, the rebel, the genius, or the joker. This book’s primary goal is to situate the artist within contemporary critical debate, discussing his production during the Postmodern Era and analysing his affinity with Hypermodernity. Through the comparison of Barcelό’s writings, declarations, and works, the study examines the artist’s autofiction, creating a connection between his hyperindividualism (which is discussed in relation to the Hypermodern Era) and the oceanic feeling. The book presents numerous unpublished materials, mostly contained in the artist’s journals or gained during numerous meetings with the artist, providing the reader with a tool to understand Barceló’s art, and also hopefully, the times we are living in.

David Hume was not only a lover of political speculation, who dealt with politics in his most important works, but also an expert in military strategies and techniques; a friend and confidant of generals, ministers, parliamentarians, local administrators, dukes, and barons. He was also a talented diplomat, a moderate member of the British government, and an original interpreter of international affairs and war, which he experienced first-hand on the battlefield. Nevertheless, until today, Hume’s practical experience as statesman has not been adequately considered. In this book, the first complete edition, the five writings concerning Hume’s involvement in the practice of policy are collected: A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, late Lord Provost of Edinburgh (1748); Account of the Descent on the Coast of Brittany and the Causes of its Failure (1746); Journal of the British Embassy to the Courts of Vienna and Turin (1748); Dispatches of a British Diplomat at Paris (1764-65); and Correspondence of an Under-Secretary of State (1767-68).

The essays contained in this volume explore the historical trajectories along which the Mediterranean has been conceptualized as a cultural, religious and economical resource and how these various aspects are intertwined. While staying clear of a merely “imagological” or “representational” point of view, the authors consider the interplay between culturally shaped attributions (for example the longstanding desire for a Mediterranean “Otherness” as expressed in German literature), their testing in empirical encounters, and the effect these encounters produce on both sides. Although focused particularly on 19th and 20th century culture, this volume offers a timely contribution to conceptualising the challenges of the 21st century. The conjunction of both provinciality and universality, the connectivity and fragmentation of the Mediterranean continues to be at the basis of the European matrix of all possible (hi)stories.

In every psychic experience, even in the production of a work of art, there exists a nucleus that is impossible to transform. It resists any and every action against itself. We are used to dealing with these irreducible and radical othernesses by adapting them to our own way of knowing and our experience. In reality, they make up the ugly material of our living and, hence, of our humanity. We can, however, transform them in some way, without altering their substance, but rather organizing them in different configurations, which generate new forms. Psychoanalysis can aid in this difficult and risky process, providing resilient equipment, much like a sophisticated spacesuit, allowing one to travel the cosmic spaces of psychic life and of human reality without bursting into flames. In the actual world, we find ourselves having to deal with problems never before encountered, which eradicate old certainties – problems which feel uncanny compared to the known experiences of ourselves and others. We meet with disorganized and fragmentary conflict, to which psychoanalysis attempts to answer adopting an open, non-defensive procedure, aiming to widen the field of experience rather than reducing it, in accordance with the basis of its practice and theory.For this reason, the interweaving of various forms of knowledge is necessary in order to link the diverse aspects and levels of psychic and external reality. The author examines this theme through the psychoanalytic approach, as well as through philosophy, science and art, and using stories based on personal life and clinical experiences.

Pop music meets the media..

The essays presented in this volume investigate the relationship between cinema and ontology. This investigation unfolds, on the one hand, through an ontological understanding of cinema, that is, an understanding of the specificity of if its being. On the other hand, it highlights the ways in which cinema can help us to shed some light on the domain of ontology, namely, what exists. The five sections of this volume, each containing a pair of complementary essays, analyse the following topics: the place of cinema in the system of the arts, the connection between cinematic realism and philosophical realism, the transition from analog to digital cinema, the specificity of films made through cell phones, and the representation of non-human animals in films.

The essay investigates the effects produced by criminal networks involved in the production and harvest of agricultural products. Focused on the analysis of caporalato , it explores the enslavement of immigrant agricultural labourers and territorial segregation practices. Moreover, it deals with the topic of the agromafi as’ role and discusses matters related to the deregulation of the agricultural market, as well as the general crisis of the agroindustries. Because caporalato has become a methodological instrument in the framework known as globalization of the farmlands , this essay tries to evaluate the complex relationship between the agromafias’ power and the operational conditions of Italy’s local economies. The authors then explore elements of the extremely pervasive criminal network, that determines productive trends of entire agricultural departments, with the intention of denouncing the dangerous socio-cultural drift that mafia-like criminal organizations are creating in Europe.

In recent decades crime fiction has enjoyed a creative boom. Although, as Alison Young argues in her book Imagining Crime (1996), crime stories remain strongly identified with specific locations, the genre has acquired a global reach, illuminating different corners of the world for the delectation of international audiences. The recent fashion for Nordic noir has highlighted the process by which the crime story may be franchised, as it is transposed from one culture to another. Crime fiction has thus become a vehicle for cultural exchange in the broadest of senses; not only does it move with apparent ease from one country to the next, and in and out of different languages, but it is also reproduced through various cultural media. What is involved in these processes of transference? Do stories lose or gain value? Or are they transformed into something else altogether? How does the crime story that originates in a specific society or culture come to articulate aspects of very different societies and cultures? And what are the repercussions of this cultural permeability?

Socialization in childhood and at a young age is marked, not only by measurable factors such as age, sex, ethnic group, religion or parents’ income, but also by variables such as depression, aggressiveness, inner calm or serenity. It makes all the difference whether a child experiences during their development an atmosphere of acceptance, gladness and emotional warmth, or one of depreciation, indifference and emotional coldness. The atmosphere in which a child is brought up shapes them as people, at least as much as the measurable factors of their social context. By discussing in detail how the atmosphere in the family, the kindergarten or at school can affect a child’s well-being, this book calls for the importance of shaping such atmospheres so to produce a positive influence on children living and learning together.