Search results for ""Aarhus University Press""

Old men - and especially old men living alone - remain an understudied group in the gerontological literature. The old man does, however, constitute a large part of the considerable demographic development, and old men living alone make up a rapidly increasing proportion of the elderly. This book is an anthology of different perspectives on the old man: What is it like to become an old man? Told by an old man. Furthermore, ideas about the old man through our cultural history and the first research on the very old man. Alcohol as a prism on how it is to become an old man. The old man and sexuality. The old man in a digitized world. Old men and masculinities. The single old man, lonely or just living alone? And several other relevant topics concerning the old man. The book takes a much-needed focus on the old man.The authors are researchers from different disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, health and gender studies.

Read more less

This issue 24 of Aarhus University Press's arts and humanities journal, "The Dolphin", offers a collection of academic essays on Shakespearean films, with nine contributions by Scandinavian and American scholars. The contributors are Susanne Fabricius, Ib Johansen, Bernice W. Kilman, Michael Mullin, Per Serritslev Petersen, Claus Schatz-Jacobsen, William E. Sheidley, Steven Shelburne and Michael Skovmand.

Read more less

A history of Denmark depicts how Denmark, the Danish kingdom and the Danish state have developed and changed over more than a thousand years.In each of the book's nine chapters, researchers from Aarhus University focus on Denmark's political, cultural, social and international conditions. The authors describe the shift from the first joint Danish kings in the Viking Age and the medieval trinity of church, king and aristocracy over the arbitrariness of autocracy to today's democracy with a global outlook. They shed light on the ravages of plague epidemics, the social changes of the Reformation as well as the economic crisis in the interwar period, the accession to the EU and the increased military involvement in foreign conflict zones. It is a Danish story about the transformation from status and class society to welfare state, from peasant country to post-industrial society and from chroniclers to influencers.Based on the latest research, A Danish History provides a systematic presentation of Denmark's history.

Read more less

In-Between: Exploring Small Cracks of Everyday Life is an anthology comprising contributions from a group of social scientists all preoccupied with the possibilities and potentials of working ethnographically. The chapters of the book investigates a range of small everyday life ‘cracks’ – a notion covering unnoticed, withdrawn and overlooked phenomena alike, and which designate the metaphorical interstices and in-betweens that influence and affect most aspects of everyday experience, the comprehensive field also subject to ethnographic inquiry. The chapters in the anthology are all based on original fieldwork and explore different cracks occurring in-between humans as well as in-between humans and non-human entities.A distinct element of the book as a whole is that it comprises experiments in terms of both ethnographic writing approaches as well as with the construction of analytical objects. The argument consistently going through the separate chapters, as well as through the volume in entirety, is that the many wondrous, mysterious, odd and puzzling phenomena encountered in everyday life are not necessarily grasped best by the application of strictly rational and rigorous academic approaches. To the contrary, and as the authors all demonstrate in their own manner, social science can also seek to fathom these sides of human existence with analytical explorations that are both sensitive, bold and infused with responsive and creative intensity.

Read more less

Why do humans congregate in groups defined by distinct cultural styles? This book seeks to answer this question through a simple yet ambitious hypothesis. It explains the emergence and persistence of social groups as dependent upon the existence of cultural immune systems that regulate both internal and external flows of information. Based on a model of the human mind as a host of cognitive systems aimed to predict the world through probabilistic models, Sørensen argues that as humans congregate in groups, we gradually align these models forming distinct social and cognitive niches. This not only enhances our ability to predict the mind and behavior of others thereby easing in-group coordination; as shared cultural models stabilize internal cognitive processing, we become self-predictive thereby paving the way for the emergence of a more stable sense of self. Further, prompted by our predictive minds, cultural models form more coherent cultural systems that regulate which new ideas are accepted and which are rejected. Identifying particular cultural immune systems, notably ritual, law, and education, Sørensen argues that these actively align participants with the predominant cultural style of a social group, and regulate interaction at different levels of social complexity.

Read more less

Danish director Lars von Trier has produced more than 20 films since his first appearance with The Elements of Crime in 1984. One of the most acknowledged – and most controversial – film directors of our time, Trier’s films often escape the representational production of meaning.In Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram scholar Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen offers a comprehensive discussion of Lars von Trier’s collected works. Examining Trier’s experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier’s unique ethically involving style activates the viewer’s entire perception apparatus. In understanding this affective involvement, the author frames the discussion around concepts from Gilles Deleuze, Alois Riegl, Brian Massumi and others on the haptic image, the diagram, affect and the signaletic material.

Read more less

Even in well-established democratic societies, the political system currently faces a crisis of civic engagement and participation. Increasingly, this lack of engagement and the accompanying erosion of institutional legitimacy result in antidemocratic, populist currents gaining ground. It is an important challenge for both the humanities and the social sciences to analyse this crisis and discuss possible answers that may contribute to strengthening the position of the democratic public sphere in the political process, thus emphasising the crucial role of civic engagement and participation in renewing democracy. The articles in this volume seek the sources for such democratic innovations in a variety of existing, less formalised practices and experiences in public space: in citizens' forums and other concrete arenas for democratic debate and participation in the media in general, including social media and other digital platforms; in social movements; and in artistic interventions in the public sphere. The volume presents selected and edited papers and keynote lectures from the international research conference The Democratic Public Sphere - Current Challenges and Prospects, which was held at Aarhus University on November 5-7, 2015. It includes contributions by keynote speakers Mark E. Warren, Nick Couldry, Donatella della Porta, and Stephen Duncombe.

Read more less

Do you know the author? Maybe not. But you probably trust him anyway, most Danes do, as much as 78%. Even people who do not know him at all trust him. He is in fact not just anyone; he has solved the riddle of Denmark's success - until now an inexplicable mystery. The answer is simple. It is the Danes' trust in him and everyone else they do not know which is Denmark's most important raw material. It makes the country one of the richest in the world. - His name? Gert Thinggard Svendsen, trust expert at the University of Aarhus, and he says: Control is good, but trust is cheaper.

Read more less

The costumes and ritual equipment presented in this volume were obtained from shamans in Mongolia and Siberia and represent today a unique cultural world heritage. They were collected in the 1930s by two Danish legendary travelers, Henning Haslund-Christensen in Mongolia, and Knud Rasmussen in Siberia. Parts of the material were described by Haslund-Christensen in earlier publications, but with senior researcher Rolf Gilberg’s manuscript, the entire material is now thoroughly described, analyzed and presented in a context for an international public. The analysis contains the history of collection of the objects alongside a well-informed description of the cosmology of Shamanism, and the diversity of shamans in the larger Mongolian region. With the expertise accumulated over more than forty years’ studies, Gilberg’s analysis is guided by an abundance of original illustrations of drawings and photographs, of which many are new recordings. The book is rounded off with a chapter where the historical costumes and ritual objects are placed in a contemporary context through the depictions of Gilberg’s meetings with Mongol shamans in Mongolia in the 1990s.

Read more less

In 1493, King Hans of Denmark and Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow concluded one of the earliest treaties of alliance between a Catholic European and an Orthodox Muscovite ruler. The alliance proved viable enough to generate two further treaties and an astounding fifty-plus diplomatic missions between Copenhagen and Moscow over the next thirty years. Yet little of scholarly value has been written about this unique late-medieval relationship across a divisive religious border.The book is intended to provide a solid foundation for a comprehensive study of the alliance. The author first goes over the peculiar customs and diplomatics of treating with medieval Russia, then proceeds to detail the diplomatic processes leading to each of the three Danish-Muscovite treaties. Further the surviving Danish and Muscovite treaty texts are published in a new critical edition with commentary and translations into English. And finally, the author reconstructs the missing originals of the treaties for a complete assembly of texts underlying the alliance.

Read more less

Negative stories make the news. Drama and conflicts, victims and villains. They are our modern world. Or are they?This revised second edition on constructive news challenges the traditional concepts and thinking of the news media. It shows the consequences media negativity has on the audience, public discourse, the press and democracy as a whole.The book also explores ways to change old news habits and provides hands-on guidelines on how to do so. Moreover, the book presents numerous examples from the author’s ten-year tenure as executive director of news at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation where he led a successful paradigm shift in news production. Constructive News is a wake-up call for a media world that struggles for a future, as well as an inspirational handbook on the next megatrend in journalism.

Read more less

Text in French.

Read more less