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Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Ikonoklasmus in der Moderne am Beispiel Barnett Newmans
(2015)
New media and digital technologies open up numerous possibilities to document different versions of reality, which makes it essential to examine how they transform the logic behind the creation and production of documentaries in digital cultures. The goal of this study is to investigate the integration between the traditional documentary and new media: the interactive documentary, in the context of the different sociocultural and technological environments of China and the West. Accordingly, a comparative study on the evolution and integration of these two fields was carried out. The documentary genre brings with it a method of classification and various modes of representing reality, while new media provide new approaches to interactivity as well as the production and distribution of interactive documentaries. In this context, the study examines the differences and characteristics of interactive documentaries in China and the West. Interactive documentaries grow and change as a continuously evolving system, engaging the roles of the author and the user, such that their roles are mixed for better co-expression and the reshaping of their shared environment. In addition, an analytical approach based on the types of interactivity was adopted to explore this new form of documentary both to deduce how the stories about our shared world can be told and to understand the impact of interactive documentaries on the construction of our versions of the reality as well as our role in it.
Von Open Access zu Open Science: Zum Wandel digitaler Kulturen der wissenschaftlichen Kommunikation
(2016)
Bei dieser Arbeit handelt es sich um eine explorative Studie zum Verständnis der Konzepte von Open Access und Open Science im Rahmen der Digitalisierung und der Differenzierung zwischen den verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen und vor dem Hintergrund wissenschaftlicher Reputation. Ziel der Arbeit ist die Darstellung, Analyse und Verhandlung der Annahmen rund um die Etablierung sowie die Durchführung von offenen und digitalen wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozessen. Die forschungsleitende Hypothese dieser Arbeit ist, dass sich die Öffnung des Zugangs zu wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen für die Gesamtgesellschaft (Open Access) in einer Übergangsphase zur Öffnung des Zugriffs auf den gesamten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozess (Open Science) befindet. Im Verlauf der Arbeit werden die Vorannahmen zum Interesse an der Öffnung wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation und der Verbreitung dieser den praktischen Gegebenheiten im wissenschaftlichen Alltag in einer Befragung gegenübergestellt. Dabei wird die Thematik in Bezug zu den Herausforderungen an die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft und das wissenschaftliche System gesetzt sowie in einen historischen Kontext gestellt. In diesem Zusammenhang werden insbesondere die Diskrepanz zwischen der Idee der Öffnung von wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation und der wissenschaftlichen Realität adressiert, sowie Katalysatoren und Hindernisse für die Umsetzung der Konzepte rund um die Öffnung von Wissenschaft identifiziert und empirisch überprüft. Die Erfahrungen und Meinungen der befragten Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftlerinnen werden den Erfahrungen aus einem Selbstversuch des jederzeit öffentlich einsehbaren Erstellungsprozesses dieser Arbeit gegenübergestellt, die Unterschiede zwischen den Disziplinen herausgearbeitet und Handlungsempfehlungen für das offene Bearbeiten wissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen abgeleitet. Abschließend werden die Ergebnisse zusammengefasst, bewertet und in einem Ausblick Anknüpfungspunkte für weitere Forschungsbemühungen dargestellt. Die gesamte Arbeit wurde direkt und unmittelbar bei der Erstellung für jeden, jederzeit frei zugänglich im Internet auf live.offene-doktorarbeit.de unter einer offenen und freien Lizenz (opendefinition.org) maschinenlesbar veröffentlicht.
Im 20. Jahrhundert hat sich der Stellenwert von Kindern in westlich geprägten Gesellschaften erhöht: Verhütung und Abtreibung sind zuverlässiger beziehungsweise sicherer, üblicher und einfacher zugänglich geworden. Die Möglichkeit, sich nun auch gegen ein Kind entscheiden zu können, legt die Vermutung nahe, dass auch die Entscheidung für ein Kind bewusster getroffen wird als in früheren Zeiten. Zudem hat sich durch (entwicklungs-)psychologische Zugänge der Blick auf Kinder verändert: Anders als zuvor werden sie nun als eigenständige Persönlichkeiten betrachtet und ihnen werden mehr Bedürfnisse zugesprochen, bei deren Nichterfüllung mit Folgen für die psychische und auch physische Gesundheit des Kindes gerechnet wird. Diese Diskurse – die (zumindest unterstellte) bewusste Entscheidung für ein Kind und die größere Bedeutung, die der Erziehung im weitesten Sinne beigemessen wird – erhöhen den gesellschaftlichen Anspruch an Mütter: Entscheidet sich eine Frau dafür, ein Kind zu bekommen, so soll sie diesem auch eine gute Mutter sein. Ausgehend von dieser Beobachtung steht die Frage nach einem veränderten Mutterideal und den damit verbundenen gesellschaftlichen Anforderungen an Mütter im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit. Exemplarisch verdeutlicht werden diese Zusammenhänge am Beispiel des Stillens.
Dass die Gleichberechtigung von Menschen ebenso wie die Würde eines jeden Menschen etwas Gutes ist - dem werden in einer demokratischen und pluralistischen Gesellschaft die meisten zustimmen können. In der praktischen Umsetzung dieser abstrakten Aussage jedoch zeigen sich Probleme. In dieser Arbeit geht es um die Herausforderung, wie die gesellschaftlich reale Vielfalt und die Ideale der Menschenrechte und der Gleichheit sprachlich umgesetzt werden können bzw. wie es gelingt, angemessene Begriffe für umstrittene Sachverhalte zu finden. Diskriminierungssensible Sprache im Sinne dieser Arbeit ist eine Sprache, die sich bemüht, Minderheiten, nichtprivilegierte Personen und Standpunkte zu erkennen, zu achten und angemessen zu berücksichtigen. Sie könnte auch als gerechte Sprache, Sprache der Vielfalt und Gleichheit, menschenfreundliches oder "anerkennungsorientiertes Sprechen" bezeichnet werden. Hinsichtlich der Bemühungen um sprachliche Umsetzung sozialer Gerechtigkeit ist in unserer Gesellschaft ein oft heftig geführter Streit entbrannt. Auf der einen Seite wollen Gruppen, die bisher wenig Gehör fanden, Ungleichheiten z.B. aufgrund der geschlechtlichen oder ethnischen Zuschreibungen nicht mehr akzeptieren und verlangen von ihren Mitmenschen, dass dies u.a. in der Art, wie über und mit ihnen gesprochen wird, zum Ausdruck kommen möge. Auf der anderen Seite möchten viele die alten sprachlichen Regeln und Gewohnheiten beibehalten. Sie empfinden neue Wortschöpfungen als überflüssig oder falsch
In Museen und Umweltzentren hält die Computertechnik Einzug. Erst in der Verwaltung zur Datenverarbeitung, dann in den Magazinen als Katalogersatz eingesetzt, breitet sich in den letzten Jahren der Computer in den Besucherbereich als Ausstellungsmedium aus. Die Ausstellungsmacher werden mit einem neuen Medium konfrontiert, welches den meisten von ihnen fremd ist. Während ihnen andere Medien der Ausstellungsgestaltung bekannt sind und sie deren Vor- und Nachteile kennen, ist ihnen allein schon die digitale Technik unvertraut.
Die Dissertation leistet einen Beitrag zur Erforschung der Schriften John Stuart Mills, indem darin Mills rudimentär ausformulierte Denkfigur und Forschungslücke der "Art of Life" untersucht wird. Die Autorin erweitert die traditionelle Interpretation Mills als klassischem Utilitaristen um einen geschärften Blick auf Mills Handhabung des antiken Theorieelements der Tugend. Drei überlappende thematische Zugänge – Lust, Charakter, Glückseligkeit - dienen der Veranschaulichung und Stärkung der These, wonach es sich bei Mills Theorie um eine hedonistische, perfektionistisch gefärbte Theorie der guten Lebensführung handelt. Der methodische Rückgriff auf die Lust- und Glückskonzeption des Aristoteles erlaubt es Mills differenzierte Auffassung von Lust bzw. Freude zu ergründen, die Rolle des menschlichen Charakters für das (moralische) Handeln festzustellen und eudemische Spuren im Verständnis von Glück aufzudecken. Abschließend bietet die Dissertationsschrift eine Interpretation der Schriften Mills als Lebenskunstphilosophie mit moralischen und außer-moralischen Ebenen und zeigt Anschlusspotentiale zu antiken, sowie zeitgenössischen (Lebenskunst) Theorien auf.
Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit gibt einen Einblick in das Konzept der Transkulturalität nach Wolfgang Welsch. Angesichts der Erkenntnisse Welschs wird ein Modell für transkulturelle Kompetenz entwickelt und vorgeschlagen, welches sich maßgeblich an dem 3-Säulen-Modell transkultureller Kompetenz nach Dagmar Domenig sowie dem Kompetenzmodell für den Lernbereich Globale Entwicklung des Bundesministeriums für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ) orientiert. Orientierungswissen (Erkennen), Selbstreflexion (Bewerten) und Empathie (Handeln) bilden die drei Säulen des hier neu vorgeschlagenen Konzeptes. Ausgehend von dem handlungs-orientierten Kommunikationsprinzip der Gewaltfreien Kommunikation nach Marshall B. Rosenberg soll die Bedeutung der Selbstempathie in Bezug auf die drei genannten Säulen dargestellt werden. Ziel der Arbeit ist es daher - neben der Entwicklung des Kompetenzmodells - zu diskutieren, inwiefern Selbstempathie notwendige Voraussetzung für die Förderung transkultureller Kompetenz ist.
Increased international compliance with human rights and democracy standards is a core issue for both human rights and democratizing actors as well as for victims of human rights abuse. International human rights organizations (IHROs) are expected to make positive contributions to this end, even though they possess low levels of authority. This authority has been renegotiated multiple times in various reform processes. An oversimplified expectation would have us assume that democracies would want to strengthen IHROs, and that autocracies would seek to weaken them. As the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was reformed in 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011, some autocracies strived to abolish parts of the UNHRC. Other autocracies aimed "merely" to weaken them. Democracies displayed an even larger variance. The question that drives this research work is how we can explain the broad variety of state preferences for strengthening or weakening IHROs. Previous research has mostly concentrated on democracies, leaving autocracies understudied. It also treated countries as black boxes. To account for such shortcomings, first, the author systematically tests the relationship between the UNHRC and its authoritarian and democratic members by means of inferential statistics. Second, he analyzes a bottom-up process inherent to New Liberalism. It scrutinizes the role of domestic societal actors, domestic institutions, as well as pressures on the international stage. The results reveal that societal actors, along with the interplay of wealth and regime type in the international realm, figure as the most important predictors of delegation preferences voiced by autocracies and democracies during the reform of the monitoring bureaucracy Special Procedures of the UNHRC. Societal actors play a more important role in democracies than in autocracies. Institutionalized domestic oversight mechanisms help societal actors to conduct effective lobbying at the domestic level. Oversight mechanisms are more important than the rule of law and electoral institutions. Regarding international coalition building, authoritarian regimes turn out to be better organized than democracies. The author concludes that supporters of strong IHROs shall 1. empower domestic societal actors; 2. disrupt cohesive delegation preferences of authoritarian regimes; and 3. invest in independent domestic oversight mechanisms.oversight mechanisms.
The Subaltern will never speak - Critical Reflection on Mill's Thoughts of Political Representation
(2018)
In 1999 David Elstein delivered a lecture series examining the evolvement of UK broadcasting policy from 1949 to 1999. His sharp analysis is a valuable contribution to the post-war devel-opment of the British broadcasting system and unfolds many topical issues in current media policy debates.
The Macro Polity Revisited
(2021)
This dissertation includes six articles tied together by the overarching question of how changes in public opinion, economics and public policy co-evolve in mature democracies, with a focus on redistributive (in seven European democracies) and secessionist preferences (in Catalonia and Scotland). The theoretical inspiration derives from three sources: 1. the Macro Polity model by Erikson, MacKuen/Stimson, 2. the Thermostatic Responsiveness model by Soroka and Wlezien, and 3. the literature on representation gap models by Gilens, Elsaesser and others. The Macro Polity and Thermostatic Responsiveness models come with an optimistic undertone, emphasizing that public policies adapt to public opinion, producing the policy-opinion congruence that defines responsive government. The Representation Gap model, by contrast, is more pessimistic in highlighting that the preferences of low-income groups are generally worse represented in public policies than the preferences of middle-income and especially high-income groups. While there is evidence in favor of these models for the majoritarian political systems in the US, Canada and the UK, less is known about the validity of these models in proportional democracies of continental Europe. The contributions in this dissertation address this research gap by integrating the three models and combining nearly 500 surveys to study the evolution of European public opinion at the national and subnational level.
Increasing objections have been formulated towards broadening the security category. Securitisation is used to bring attention to urgent and existential threats that cannot be resolved through ordinary political decisions. During the time of the state of emergency between 2015 and 2017, France strengthened its security forces and introduced generalised surveillance measures to curb the terrorist threat. The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to problematise the securitisation of terrorism in the French case. To do so, the Just Securitisation Theory by Rita Floyd is used to examine the following research question: Was it just to securitise terrorism in France between 2015 and 2017? Through critical discourse analysis of 54 presidential speech acts and secondary text analysis, this study aims to scrutinise securitising moves and security practices of the French government. The presented results indicate that the justness of securitisation is highly questionable. The analysis shows that the governments set excessive goals of eliminating terrorism and that security measures were misappropriated to fight organised crime instead of terrorism.
The ethical apparatus: The material-discursive shaping of ethics, autonomy, and the driverless car
(2023)
This research argues that the emergent driverless car, as a kind of autonomous vehicle, is a Foucault-ian "ethical apparatus", working as an epistemic device to materially embody and enable discursive power by generating notions of "autonomy" and "ethical decision-making". The ethical implications of AI, algorithmic, and autonomous technologies are topics of current regulatory and academic concern. This concern relates to the lack of meaningful oversight of black boxes inside AI systems, liabilities for manufacturers, and inadequate frameworks to hold AI-based socio-technical systems to account. One recent artefact, the driverless car, has taken on these concerns quite literally in the shaping of a niche discourse of the "ethics of autonomous driving". Ambitions to produce a fully autonomous vehicle based on AI technologies are constrained by speculative concerns that its decision-making in unexpected accident situations cannot be assumed to protect humans. "The ethics of autonomous driving" evaluates proposals to build "ethical machines" by examining the relationship between structures of human values and moral decision-making, and how they comport to computational architectures for decision-making. This is the first case this work takes up, chiefly organised around an analysis of a thought experiment, the Trolley Problem, and the online game, Moral Machine, that crowdsourced values to suggest approaches to an "ethics of autonomous driving". Rather than evaluate the feasibility or appropriateness of these two approaches, this work attends to the more critical issue that ethics is being proposed in terms of technologies turning on the logics of risk, speculation, and probabilistic correlations that are fundamental to how machine learning makes decisions. The concern in this work is less a normative framework or approach for a better or more appropriate ethics of autonomous driving. Rather, this work argues that what we understand as "the ethical" is being transformed when architected by, through, and for Artificial Intelligence / autonomous technologies to become their own regulators. Hence the production of autonomous driving necessitates computational infrastructures that are creating a world legible to and for the navigation of a driverless car. The author argues that this is fostering computational governance that has implications for human bodies and social relations, chiefly that conventional approaches to regulation and accountability attend to human values and decision-making rather than computational ones. A second case that this research examines is that of driverless car crashes, to examine how "autonomous" driving requires substantial embodied human knowledge and micro-work. Taken together, these two cases make an argument for how myriad practices of knowledge-production are translating the human world into something legible to the navigational needs of the car, producing changes in the human world through the actions of the car on that basis, and advancing notions of "autonomy". This work concludes with arguments for a critical reconceptualisation of ethics and ethical decision-making in AI / autonomous systems.
The literature on term bids by presidents tends to focus on the institutional arrangements to hinder such term bids in the first place, on presidential strategies to circumvent the constitutional law, or on counteractions of political elites. Mobilizations against such attempts by presidents to run for office again, after reaching the end of their last allowed term, are often solely included as "pressures from below". To address these shortcomings, this dissertation explores the issue of term amendment struggles through the lenses of contentious politics systematically combined with insights of revolution theories and democratization studies. Its conceptual perspective therefore lies on the interactions of actors and their constellations to each other as well as to institutions. The author deduces three diverse pathways to promote institutional change and prevent democratic backslidings – through political elites, (political) allies, and security forces. By selecting two cases that are most similar in terms of institutions and youth movements at the forefront, Senegal (2011-12) and Burkina Faso (2013-14), this analysis offers insight in the divergence of the struggles and their outcome. Because in both cases, the announcement of the presidents to run for another term in office led to broad mobilization led by youth movements against such tenure amendments, the political system in general and socioeconomic inequalities - but with diverging results. In Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré eventually resigned while Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal candidated again, legitimized by the Constitutional Court. Based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews with movement leaders and their allies, as well as a comprehensive media analysis and the SCAD databank for the analysis of protest events, the author differentiates and reconstructs the various phases of the conflict. The results of the dissertation point at two dimensions most relevant to comprehend the dissimilar pathways the struggles took – the reach of mobilization and, closely interlinked to the first, the refusal of soldiers to obey orders. It shows further that these differences go back to the respective history of each country, its former protest waves, and political culture. Although both presidents faced mass mobilization against their unconstitutional candidature, only in Burkina Faso it eventually led to an ungovernable situation. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on lessons learned for future democratic backslidings by presidents to come and avenues for future research – and thus offers fruitful insights.
Rethinking Gamification
(2014)
Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game. The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification!
This doctoral thesis contains four empirical studies analysing the personal accountability of prime ministers and the electoral presidentialisation of parliamentary elections in European democracies. It develops the concept of presidentialised prime ministerial accountability as a behavioural element in the chain of accountability in parliamentary systems. The ongoing presidentialisation of parliamentary elections, driven by changes in mass communication and erosion of societal cleavages, that fosters an increasing influence of prime ministers' and other leading candidates' personalities on vote choices, has called performance voting – and the resulting accountability mechanism of electoral punishment and reward of governing parties – into question. This thesis analyses whether performance voting can be extended to the personal level of parliamentary governments and asks whether voters hold prime ministers personally accountable for the performance of their government. Furthermore, it explores how voters change their opinion of prime ministers and how differences in party system stability and media freedom between Western and Central Eastern Europe contribute to higher electoral presidentialization in Central Eastern European parliamentary elections. This thesis relies on several national data sources: the "British Election Study", the "German Longitudinal Election Study" and other German election surveys, the "Danish Election Study", as well as, data from the "Forschungsgruppe Wahlen". In addition, it utilises cross-national data from the "Comparative Study of Electoral Systems".