Im Entwicklungsplan Elektromobilität der Deutschen Bundesregierung wird „eine technologische Zeitenwende im Verkehrsbereich“ angekündigt. Tatsächlich zeigt die technikhistorische Rückschau, dass die Wahl des Antriebs die Bedeutung des Automobils insgesamt beeinträchtig. Im vorliegenden InnoZ-Baustein wird mit den Begriffen Paradigma und Leitbild eine soziologische Unterscheidungshilfe vorgeschlagen, um die innerwissenschaftliche mit der gesamtgesellschaftlichen Entwicklung zu vergleichen. Die Begriffe beschreiben in doppelter Hinsicht die kulturelle 'Verfestigung' automobiler Entwicklungen zu einem Funktionsraum aus technischer, politischer und sozialer Dimension. Die Geschichte des Elektromobils zeigt, dass es nicht allein aufgrund technologischer Defizite unterlegen war, sondern weil es den einmal gesetzten Parametern des automobilen Funktionsraums immer weniger entsprach. Dies zeigt das Beispiel des gescheiterten Elektromobiles im Frankreich der 1970er Jahre. Die Arbeit gelangt zu dem Schluss, dass für den Erfolg der Elektromobilität das Verhältnis zwischen den Überzeugungen der Fachwelt und den Ansprüchen der Öffentlichkeit von zentraler Bedeutung ist. Ein ausgewogenes Verhältnis ist durch eine „konzertierte Aktion“ aus technologischem Paradigmenwechsel und gesellschaftlichem Leitbildwandel erreichbar. Dies beinhaltet ein grundlegend neues Verständnis von (Auto)mobilität, wie es sich durch Schlagwörter wie City Car, Public Electric / Nothing less than “a technological turn of the tides” has been announced by the Cabinet of Germany in its master plan for electromobility, the Entwicklungsplan Elektromobilität. Indeed, the techno-historical retrospective shows that the choice of propulsion has a great effect on the automobile as such. This issue of the InnoZ-Baustein proposes a classification approach via the terms paradigm and visions of technology. These terms allow for a comparison between innovation within the scientific community and within the whole of society. Also, they describe - in two distinct respects - the cultural “hardening” of automotive development towards a confined space. This space is constructed in three dimensions: the technological, the political and the social dimension. The history of the electric vehicle shows that this technology was ultimately noncompetitive not only due to technological hurdles but also because it just did not fit with the confined space of the automobile. This is well demonstrated by the example of the failed electric vehicle in the France of the 1970s. The paper concludes with the finding that the balance between expert opinion s and public requirements is of essential relevance for the successful introduction of electromobility. A well balanced ratio is achievable through a “concentrated initiative” of change regarding the technological paradigm as well as the societal principle. This includes a fundamentally new perspective on (auto)mobility – represented by the key words City Car, Public Electric Car or Vehicle to Grid.

Here we ask ourselves not where objects come from, but investigate our relationship with what lies beneath the material. Within the Two Point O project, in the Växjö Crisis Edition, the practice of Care Biopics evolves. These individualised interventions bring us face to face with multiple storylines and definitions of an object valued during times of crisis. How does the proposed exploration of Care Biopics, community values and material symbolism facilitate the shift from mindless overconsumption to mindful materialism?Through several aspects of co-creating digital material, definitions and common values, Care Biopics weave a practice of democratic and accessible design. A practice of inclusitivty, caring with and social sustainability. A practice of designing not for, but with the people.

The fast fashion industry has a large negative impact on the environment and its workers. Consumers purchasing fast fashion are reinforcing the dominant social paradigm, the assumption that humans are superior and the Earth’s resources unlimited. Even though customers are reconsidering their fashion consumer behavior, they often fall back to making unsustainable choices. Research has shown that communication strengthens ethical consumption and supports reducing the attitude-behavior gap. This study proposes that sustainable communication encourages fashion customers to reason with themselves in a way their behavior evolves to be more sustainable. The aim is to investigate customers’ reception and interaction with sustainable communication using the example of the ethical fashion brand Nudie Jeans. Based on the theories of the attitude-behavior gap and sustainable communication, semi-structured in-depth interviews with Nudie Jeans customers were conducted. The analysis of the interview responses demonstrates the initial presence of an attitude-behavior gap and low awareness of sustainable communication among customers. The research indicates that after customers have developed an awareness of sustainable concerns in the fashion industry, a fashion brand can succeed in encouraging customers to adjust predominant consumption patterns towards more ethical ones. On this basis, it is recommended that ethical fashion brands continuously use transparent sustainable communication to educate consumers about the environmental and social maladministration in the fashion industry.

Univerzita Karlova v Praze Přírodovědecká fakulta Studijní program: Filosofie a dějiny přírodních věd MUDr. Jan Hrudka Nádory v dějinném a kulturním kontextu v novověku Tumours in historical and social context in the modern period Disertační práce Školitel / Supervisor: Prof. RNDr. Stanislav Komárek, Dr. Praha, 2017 SUMMARY: The PhD thesis called Tumours in historical and social context in the modern period is an attempt to describe a change of medical thinking in modern period; science and medicine turns from antique humoral pathology, explaining all diseases as an imbalance of the four body humours, to pathological anatomy and experimental physiology. In the point of view of pathological anatomy, the viscera of diseased person are no more "screen" or "mirror" of the disease, but it becomes directly the "stage" or "theatre" of the acting disease. This shift in the thought may be labelled as movement from humoralism to localism or ontologism; the disease isn't just abnormal amount of some natural juice any more, but becomes new original entity. This change undergoes the understanding of tumours and cancerous disease as well. Instead of antique understanding tumours as precipitates of black bile, the cell theory occurs in the 19th century. This theory explains tumours as a mass of cells undergoing excessive...

Is a meme just a humorous composition made to make people laugh, or does it have potential to connote something more? This became the question that gave this article life and emerged when the official Twitter account of Ukraine posted memes mid-war. In order to examine whether a meme has potential to connote something more this article studied memes with the questions RQ1: Do memes function as a multimodal tool for intermediation of narratives and societal discourses on the official Twitter account of Ukraine? RQ2: Which semiotic choices in language and visual communication mainly appear in the memes?  RQ3: How do the main semiotic choices in the memes interact with each other? RQ4: Are, for Ukraine, societal discourses and/or narratives present within the memes? Four memes were collected from the official Twitter account of Ukraine and analyzed with a multimodal critical discourse analysis. Drawing on Fisher's narrative paradigm, this article argues that the use of a meme can be seen as storytelling. In order to investigate the nature of a meme and to understand how a meme can mediate discourse, we draw on Shifman and critical discourse in our analysis. Linking our analysis to former research is done to help the reader understand the multifaceted nature of a meme. The result of this study shows that a meme in this particular case can be used as a multimodal communicative tool for storytelling and the mediating of social discourses, therefore further studies on the subject of memes are recommended.

Luftmakt är i relation till andra tvångsmaktsmedel relativt nytt. Tvångsmedlet har använts under cirka 100 år för att påverka motståndarens beslutsfattande. Luftmakt anammades snabbt av resursstarka stormakter, som då också skapade grundförutsättningar för dess användande. Med tid och teknikutveckling har även mindre resursstarka stater tagit till sig luftmakt, men då också behållit stormakternas teoretiska grund och doktriner. Detta utgör ett problem för en resurssvag småstat – att använda ett tvångsmaktsmedel där det råder obalans mellan tillgängliga resurser och tänkt användningsområde. Shaun Clarke utvecklar år 2001 en luftmaktsteori för småstater där denna obalans i resurser omhändertas och utnyttjas. Ett problem kopplat till småstatsteori är att det ofta saknas empirisk grund för dess validitet, detta gäller även för Clarkes teori. Syftet med studien är att pröva hans teori mot två skilda fall, där småstater segrat med hjälp av luftmakt. Studiens fall är luftmaktsanvändning i Bekaadalen 1982 och Andra Karabakh-kriget 2020. Studiens resultat visar att Clarkes teori delvis kan förklaras i de båda fallen och kräver ytterligare prövning innan teorin kan bekräftas eller avfärdas med empirisk bevisning.

Research philosophies and paradigms (RPPs) reveal researchers’ assumptions and provide a systematic way in which research can be carried out effectively and appropriately. Different studies highlight cognitive and comprehension challenges of RPPs concepts at the postgraduate level. This study develops a natural language processing (NLP) supervised classification application that guides students in identifying RPPs applicable to their study. By using algorithms rooted in a quantitative research approach, this study builds a corpus represented using the Bag of Words model to train the naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine algorithms. Computer experiments conducted to evaluate the performance of the algorithms reveal that the Naïve Bayes algorithm presents the highest accuracy and precision levels. In practice, user testing results show the varying impact of knowledge, performance, and effort expectancy. The findings contribute to the minimization of issues postgraduates encounter in identifying research philosophies and the underlying paradigms for their studies. / Science and Technology Education / MTech. (Information Technology)

The general aim of this masters thesis is to analyze and compare Terry Cook's och John Ridener's theories of historical archival paradigms with empirical material taken from a Swedish archival context, in order to test the general explanatory value of the theories. The selected source material consists of three politically commissioned archival investigations from the period 1988-2019. Two research questions are formulated. The first question is: How do central problem formulations and proposed solutions differ from each other in the three commissioned archival investigations from the period 1988-2019? The second question is: How do central problem formulations and proposed solutions in the three commissioned archival investigations relate to Terry Cook's and John Ridener's theories about different archival paradigms during the same period? The method of investigation is WPR-analysis, which focuses on how political solution proposals relate to conceptualized problems in particular societal spheres. Two conclusions are presented. The first conclusion is that it is possible to trace a continuity between problem formulations and proposed solutions in the three commissioned investigations, where similarities are generally more common than differences. The second conclusion is that the relationship between central problem formulations and proposed solutions in the commissioned investigations from 1988-2019 and the theories of paradigmatic tendencies during the same period is rather weak, considering that characteristic features of chronologically relevant paradigm periods in both Cook's and Ridener's theories do not correspond clearly with the source material. The results thus demonstrate that the explanatory value of the theories can be questioned.

The presented doctoral thesis examines character and significance of the culture of martyrdom (farhang-e shahadat) in contemporary Iranian society with a particular emphasis on delimitation religious-political dimension of this phenomenon and determination of causes and implications of relatively recent reinterpretation which has radically shifted this culture from the religious-spiritual sphere to the political-ideological and even revolutionary. On the one hand, the thesis deals with a complex view of mechanism and manners of the utilization of the Karbala paradigm as the instrument for formulation of politically (and otherwise) motivated aims by different spectres of power structures of the ruling establishment and diverse oppositional social movements and on the other hand it reflects its apolitical standpoint associated with a spiritual experience of believers, which proceeds from the popular religion. These aspects of the political and religious boundary of the culture of martyrdom are examined in detail and given in the context of current socio-political reality. The thesis also strives for presenting of arguments founded on the premise which defines the culture of martyrdom as an essential source for constructing of identities and strengthening of solidarity among Iranian Imami Shi'ites,...

Thesis (Ph.D. (Communication Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / This thesis explored the narratives of Soviet survivors of the Soviet-Afghanistan War that lasted from 1979 to 1989. The purpose of this exploration was to gain an understanding of the individual arguments that these survivors were making in a published work by Belarussian literary journalist Svetlana Alexievich, in her book Zinky Boys: Soviet voices from the Afghanistan War, that was originally published in 1989, and translated into English in 1992. The thesis purpose was to determine the central public moral argument that the published work is making at the close of the Soviet-Afghan War. The body of literature reviewed and discussed in Chapter 3 helped frame the interpretative context for the study. The themes that emerged and captured there are all external in origin to the core text of Zinky Boys, and served a triangulatory purpose to some of the emic data that emerged in the process of analysis of the core text. One of the major influencers of the study is JC Behrends (2015b) who associated the concept of the Gewaltraum with the Soviet-Afghan War. The notion of agency that was advanced by Giddens in 1984 is equally of importance, as well as Milgram’s (1984) ideas of the agentic state and Obedience to Authority Theory. As theorists, Habermas’ (1991) advancement of the Theory of the Public Sphere and Fisher’s (1984) Narrative Paradigm, contribute to and influence the theoretical grounding of the study. The study followed the methodology of a textual analysis within the narrative turn, and utilised Fisher’s fidelity and probability tests as proposed within his narrative paradigm to construct a set of thematic intertexts, which provided compelling good reasons to accept the narratives of the survivors. In addition, Fisher’s (1984) differentiating features that set the public moral argument aside from reasoned discourse of the type used in more formal settings were applied to ensure that the public moral argument as derived from the text of Zinky Boys meets the requirements of a public moral argument. As a published work, the public moral argument emerging from Zinky Boys is a matter for the public sphere as Habermas (1991) envisages the sphere as a public space for public reasoned discourse in conflict with the political state. In this instance, it is specifically the Soviet public sphere, which is historically important as the Soviet-Afghan War concluded shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This thesis positions Zinky Boys as portraying the public moral argument of the Soviet survivors in the public sphere. The major findings of the thesis indicate that the Soviet Limited Contingent in Afghanistan were exposed to extreme levels of violence which is portrayed as a Gewaltraum (violent space). Secondly, the thesis finds that the agency of the Soviets in Afghanistan was often of a violent and abusive nature. A third finding indicates that participants in the war and their immediate family members, notably mothers, become victims of the psychological and physical impact of war. Finally, the finding is presented that the matter of the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan had become a matter for discussion in the public sphere. The resulting public moral argument positions the survivors of the Soviet-Afghan War as victims of the Soviet State due to their agentic state and psychological changes that they underwent in the Gewaltraum of Afghanistan, as well as the Soviet media campaign of disinformation and victimisation, and its effect on their standing as Soviet citizens and their inability to reintegrate successfully back into society. Key words Textual analysis; Intertextuality; Narrative journalism; Narrative paradigm; Phenomenology; Public Moral Argument; Public Sphere.