Although inquiry in philosophy and some social sciences has attended closely to the question of how investigators use language to describe and explain phenomena of interest, less attention has been devoted to questions of language use in psychological science. This essay explores language use in a major subfield of psychology, the psychology of personality. We identify three descriptive and explanatory languages in the field and critique them from the perspective of scholarship outside of psychology that has explored language use. We conclude with a call for greater exchange between investigators who embrace discursive accounts of persons and social action, and those who posit social-cognitive accounts of the knowledge that individuals use when they create discourse in their efforts to understand the world and to direct their experiences and actions.

As governments grapple with increased risks associated with more frequent and impactful disasters, climate change, social inequity, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, questions about resilience take on greater urgency. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strive for science to be beneficial to society. In 2012, the National Academies released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps the United States could take towards building disaster resilience. A new program, the Resilient America Program, was created as an outgrowth of that report. Its core mission is to partner with communities across the nation to help decision-makers identify key priorities for their community; tie those priorities to relevant risks; and identify actions that build resilience to those risks. The Resilient America Program is a novel program of the National Academies; it employs a hands-on approach to bring science into decision-making by working directly with decision-makers to test approaches for communicating and managing risk, measuring resilience, building community partnerships, and sharing relevant resilience information.

The purpose of this paper is to revise essentialist conceptions of the European Union citizenship and European identity, and make a case for a ‘politics of affinity’. This politics is founded on flexible notion of Union citizenship that accommodates multiple identities. The ‘politics of affinity’ avoids homogenizing assumptions and unitary conceptions of European, national, regional and other identities. It promotes diversity, otherness and fluid character of the postmodern European citizenship. It also advocates a more fluid idea of boundaries. The politics of affinity grounds European politics and citizenship discourse on affinity (not identity). The following lines will reflect on the institutional mechanisms, reforms and policies needed for the implementation of the politics of affinity. This paper will focus on the Treaty of Lisbon, the 2004/38 Citizenship Directive, the 2003 Directive on Long-term Residence Third Country Nationals and some ECJ's rulings in the new millennium.

The creation, roles, and experience of meaningful places in contemporary urban environments can be effectively informed through understandings of pertinent aspects of sacred architecture. To do so, this paper will discuss the mediating roles traditionally performed by sacred architecture and, in particular, its traditional role as an in-between place believed by its creators to establish connections to the understandings they sought or the gods they worshipped. Enduring themes of sacred places will be presented in the context of their communicative capacity and ritual uses, as a means to offer interpretations appropriate to today. The case study of the recently completed Oakland (CA) Cathedral will serve to illustrate contemporary positions and iterations. The conclusion suggests that the sacred place was (and still is), an intermediate zone created in the belief that it had the ability to engage, elucidate and transform, and that a re-introduction and repositioning of the mediating roles performed by the built environment can inform the creation of engaging and meaningful places today.

From the Renaissance, dance and sport formed the basis of ‘polite’ and ethical behaviour. Both offered a frame within which social norms could be taught and enacted. Scholarship has often concentrated either on the history and aesthetics of dance or on those of gymnastics but neglected the proximity of both forms to each other. This paper focuses on one particular narrative: the intertwining of dance and gymnastics as utopian projects in the arousal of nationalism and creation of a new ‘German’ body. From Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who sketched the first national and patriotic movement system in Die deutsche Turnkunst 1816, to dance master Franz Anton Roller, gymnastics teacher Adolf Spiess, and dance gurus Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, it will demonstrate how the distinction between dance and gymnastics was constantly re-negotiated; and it argues that twentieth-century Modern Dance developed out of nineteenth-century Turnen and gymnastics. Dance intended to revolutionise German society physically and aesthetically and incorporated spatial concepts and movement sequences that gymnastics systems had already explored. Through their conceptions of motion in time and space, dance and gymnastics created a modern and revolutionary physical practice for the German nation.

Return migration has been one of the rather neglected aspects of migration until recently, although a considerable number of international migrants as well as inter-regional migrants return to their place of origin. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1990s, the interest for issues related to return migration has grown considerably. In the context of Turkish return migration there still is a lack of information about the motives for returning, the new social status, the levels of satisfaction and reintegration as well as the employment and income of emigrants who have returned home. This paper aims at shedding light on this neglected aspect of Turkish migration in the context of Europe as well as on the history of Turkey as a country of immigration.

This paper deals with the transfer of Arab visual theory in the Middle Ages, as it is believed that the cultural significance of this transfer needs a new emphasis. Mathematical perspective was invented in Florentine Renaissance Art. However, except in the history of science, it is a little known fact that this visual theory was based on the Book of Optics, written by Ibn al Haithan, also known as Alhazen, and was translated, probably in Spain, with the Latin title Perspectiva. We therefore can speak of a double history of perspective, as visual theory and as pictorial theory. The main argument is to identify the importance of images, which separate Arab thought from Western thinking. It was the transformation of mathematics into art, in the Western sense, that allows us to distinguish two different cultures. In this process, the invention of mathematical space by Biagio Pelacani was an important step. Thereafter, the gaze and its looking space became a new concern of the Renaissance.

After the collapse of communism, the Central and Eastern European countries decided to implement a market economy embedded in a democratic order. A constituent element of the transition was a fully-fledged integration with the global economy. One of the consequences of this integration is that the countries are now severely hit by the financial crisis. Until recently, however, it all looked flourishing and economic growth figures indicated a steady catch up with average welfare levels in the European Union (EU). On the website of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development an essay competition was launched for those who were born in 1989. In an introductory statement, a Russian joke is quoted: ‘Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true’.1 This article addresses the impact of the financial crisis in Central and Eastern Europe and in essence starts from this quote. It seeks to explain the extent to which the financial crisis in the Central and Eastern Europe question reveals the downside of a capitalist system embedded in a global economic order.

The Nordic countries of Europe have many common traits. They are small countries in Northern Europe, they have been Lutheran since the Reformation, and they had, for centuries, a strong landholding peasantry but a weak aristocracy. They developed a comprehensive welfare state after the Second World War, and they are more sceptical about European integration than people from other countries in Western Europe. Despite attempts to create a Nordic union and the existence of a Nordic Council, their joint Nordic orientation has been subordinated to the national interests of the individual Nordic countries. They are clear-cut nation states with a nationalism that is not fierce, but represents a kind of official, controlled and uniform national spirit. With respect to parliamentary politics and social policy the main features of the countries have been called the Nordic Model. The model still exists, but rests on shakier ground than before.

There is no culture that is both general throughout Europe and unique to Europe. So we cannot speak of a ‘European civilization’ in the same sense as in phrases such as ‘Chinese civilization’ or ‘Jewish civilization’ or ‘French civilization’. It is therefore prudent not to appeal to the concept of a European civilization in an attempt to justify the attempt to create a European Union or to accelerate the process of Europe-wide state-building. Nor should we feel constrained by such a concept: the future of a European Union should not be influenced by current or traditional ideas of what European civilization is, since such ideas are mistaken: it can be as protean and pluralistic as we wish to make it.

This study sheds new light on the different characteristics of social networks for COVID-19 in European regions. This study explores six countries (the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and Sweden) by employing social network analysis for Twitter. First, this study finds that European countries show different characteristics for social networks with regard to COVID-19. For example, the UK has only national key players, France shows a majority of national key players, and other countries have all global key players. Donald Trump played an important role in the social networks of Italy, Germany and Sweden while he was the US president. Second, European countries demonstrate different social networks for groups. For example, the UK shows the most active communications across groups, whereas Germany shows the least communication networks across groups. Lastly, European countries reveal highly different interests regarding COVID-19. For example, the UK is more interested in the epidemic and vaccines, Germany focuses on schools and studies, and Sweden cares more about herd immunity and lockdown.

Expected utility theory tells us how we should make decisions under uncertainty: we should choose the option that leads to the greatest expectation of utility. This may, however, not be the option that is likely to produce the best result – that may be the wrong choice if it also creates a small chance of a great disaster. A small chance of disaster may be the most important consideration in decision making. Climate change creates a small chance of disaster, and some authors believe this to be the most important consideration in deciding our response to climate change. To know whether they are right, we need to make a moral judgement about just how bad the disaster would be.

This article investigates how Turkey implements its responsibilities of an international refugee protection regime at policy level, and it focuses specifically on empirical scholarship about the domestic responses to Syrian refugees. While refugee protection draws on the principles of humanitarianism and non-refoulement in general, how it is understood and delivered is complex and situation-specific. In the exponentially growing literature on Syrian refugees in Turkey, the scholarship often takes for granted the policy responses without highlighting their relations with practices. With situational analysis of the secondary documents, this article introduces refugee protection policies and regulations and makes an analysis of domestic responses in different fields concerning Syrian refugees. This critical appraisal finds that Turkey’s responses mostly include humanitarian social protection and lack rights-based legal protection. This pushes Syrian refugees into exploitative situations.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

From the late 1870s until his death in 1901, the Irish physicist G. F. Fitzgerald was one of the most active and influential proponents of Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. Along with Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, and other ‘Maxwellians’, Fitzgerald took the lead in extending Maxwell's theory, clarifying its expression, and subjecting it to experimental test. The surviving correspondence of this Maxwellian circle provides a window into the workings of late Victorian physics and into the private side of scientific communication.

The relations between different countries and continents have always been important politically and scientifically. This applies in particular to relations between Turkey and Europe. Through centuries, the Ottoman Empire was seen as the main enemy of ‘Christian Europe’. In this paper, three topics are discussed: (1) European, and in particular Austrian and German, attitudes towards Turkey's membership in the European Union. It is argued that the dominantly negative attitudes in this regard do not indicate a generally negative attitude towards Turkey. (2) Some of the reasons for the negative view of Turkish EU-membership in many EU countries are discussed. (3) In conclusion, three issues are taken up: the relevance of Turkish EU-membership; the reasons and persistence of national and ethnic stereotypes; the relevance of the time factor in international relations.

This article aims to highlight the impact on local development of traditional economic activities. The case study that the authors consider concerns an area in the Romanian Carpathians developed through transhumant grazing and forestry activities: Mărginimea Sibiului. As shepherding kept developing, forest-cutting intensified to make room for pastures and hayfields, thus stimulating activities connected with the processing of wood. As trade on the Danube was liberalized under the Peace Treaty of Adrianople and cultivated lands in the south of the country kept extending, transhumance steadily lost in importance, especially in the twentieth century, in the wake of the Second World War. This process was intensified by the collectivization practised in the socialist-type centralized economy period. Currently, transhumance at Mărginimea Sibiului is practised only in four villages: Poiana Sibiului, Tilişca, Jina and Răşinari. Sheep flocks and the herd of cattle are moved from the village to the mountain pastures, along age-old pastoral paths, strictly observed and known by the rural communities. Most pasture-lands lie far from the village hearths, in the highlands. The future development of Mărginimea Sibiului involves the revival of traditional economic activities, as well as the development of tourism as a representative economic branch for this region.

This paper examines the potential impact of East–West migration of talent on the innovative capital and hence the long-run growth prospects in Eastern sending countries. Complementing previous studies, we examine the impact of high-skill migration not only on the formation of human capital, but also consider migration’s impact on knowledge capital in the sending countries. In line with previous studies, we find that, in the short- to medium-term, high-skill migration strictly reduces national innovative capital and hence increases the gap between East and West. However, these effects might be mitigated by factors such as reinforced education of workers, productive investment of remittances, return migration and increased knowledge transfer. Given that the emigration of highly skilled labour affects human capital differently than it does knowledge capital, differentiated policies are required for human capital and knowledge capital in order to efficiently address the adverse impact of the most talented and highly skilled workers.