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International Stage (international + stage)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences60%

Selected Abstracts

European Schoolnet: enabling school networking

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, Issue 4 2009
SANTI SCIMECA
School networking is increasingly important in a globalised world, where schools themselves can be actors on an international stage. This article builds on the activities and experience of the longest established European initiative in this area, European Schoolnet (EUN), a network of 31 Ministries of Education. First, we offer an introduction covering school networks. We then describe the case of European Schoolnet, its history, role, and relationship with other school networks in the world. We then describe the underlying structure of EUN school networks and their basic characteristics. Using these basic characteristics as a framework, we consider a number of eTwinning, European Schoolnet networks: Network of Innovative Schools (ENIS) and myEUROPE. Last, we identify key features of network literacy, potential future trends in school networks, and areas where further research is needed in this field, and offer some recommendations. [source]

Brecht and Sinn und Form: The Creation of Cold War Legends

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2007
Stephen Parker
ABSTRACT Brecht and Peter Huchel's Sinn und Form are among the few examples of early GDR cultural life with a genuine capacity to accumulate cultural capital on the international stage. The analysis of Brecht's collaboration with Sinn und Form in the Deutsche Akademie der Künste offers a fresh perspective upon their attainment of a legendary pre-eminence in German cultural life during the Cold War. Brecht's espousal of Marxism-Leninism and of a relative artistic autonomy, informed by political constraints, ensured some common ground with the SED leadership. However, the Party's enforcement of a binary opposition between Socialist Realism and Formalism became a crucial field of conflict, spawning major illusions and antagonisms between the artistic and political elites. In key contributions to Sinn und Form, Brecht foregrounded aesthetic considerations and historical responsibility, yet the SED's nationalistic discourse colouring Socialist Realism was motivated by the geopolitical imperative of justifying the GDR's status among the people's democracies of the Eastern Bloc. This, in turn, justified the SED's subordination of cultural to political capital, dismissing the claims of elite culture in a series of staged events. The position of Brecht and his supporters was relentlessly eroded until, quite improbably, the crisis of 17 June 1953 allowed them to turn the tables. While popular opposition was suppressed, Brecht simultaneously re-affirmed his loyalty to the weakened SED leadership, whose revolutionary achievements he continued to praise, and re-asserted the relative autonomy of the elite Akademie and its journal. Brecht and Sinn und Form capitalised upon their enhanced reputations, securing the legendary status that later repression did nothing to diminish. [source]

Pawns of international finance and politics: Florentine sculptors at the court of Henry VIII

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 1 2006
Cinzia Maria Sicca
The aim of this paper is to place the projected tomb of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon within a wider context of events that are specifically of a political and economic nature. The artists are at once pawns in the hands of diplomats and financiers motivated by their inner rationale, as well as actors in their own right, discovering in a somewhat tentative way that, though not entirely free from the system of patronage of either institutions or princely families, they could jostle for position on the international stage, relying almost entirely on their own enterprising skills. The episode of the tomb, far from being a footnote in the history of the competition between Michelangelo and Bandinelli, offers an unusual insight into the workings of Medici patronage at a very delicate time in the history of both Leo X and Cardinal Giulio de' Medici. The favour accorded to Baccio Bandinelli precluded, during Leo's lifetime, the possibility that any other sculptor would be offered even a chance of being a candidate for this commission. The death of the pontiff left the Cardinal not only in a political quandary but also in dire financial straits. Yet the support and loyalty of the English monarch were crucial to Giulio de' Medici's success in his own endeavours to ascend the papal throne and, perhaps more importantly, to preserve Medici control over Florence. The trusted members of the Medici entourage representing both Florence and the family's interests at the court of Henry VIII, prevented the tomb project from dying altogether. The involvement of Giovanni Cavalcanti and his business partners Pierfrancesco de' Bardi and Zanobi Girolami, as well as that of Giovanni Gaddi, was financial since each partner bought stakes in the models prepared by a number of artists, but at the same time aesthetic judgement had to be exercised by one if not all the investors in selecting the authors of the models sent to London in 1521,1523. This opened the way for sculptors who had previously suffered from Bandinelli's overbearing dominance: namely Baccio da Montelupo, and Jacopo Sansovino. [source]

The "Middle Power" Concept in Australian Foreign Policy

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 4 2007
Carl Ungerer
During the early 1990s, the Hawke and Keating Labor governments promoted Australia's diplomatic credentials as an activist and independent middle power. Labor claimed that by acting as a middle power Australia was constructing a novel diplomatic response to the challenges of the post-Cold War world. But a closer reading of the official foreign policy record since 1945 reveals that previous conservative governments have also taken a similar view of Australia's place and position on the international stage. This essay traces the historical evolution of the middle power concept in Australian foreign policy and concludes with an assessment of the Howard government's more recent reluctance to use this label and its implications for Australia's future middle power credentials. Although its use has waxed and waned in official policy discourse and it is more commonly associated with Labor governments, the middle power concept itself and the general diplomatic style it conveys have been one of the most durable and consistent elements of Australia's diplomatic practice. [source]

Geologic Time Scale 2004 , why, how, and where next!

LETHAIA, Issue 2 2004
FELIX GRADSTEIN
A Geologic Time Scale (GTS2004) is presented that integrates currently available stratigraphic and geochronologic information. The construction of Geologic Time Scale 2004 (GTS2004) incorporated different techniques depending on the data available within each interval. Construction involved a large number of specialists, including contributions by past and present subcommissions officers of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), geochemists working with radiogenic and stable isotopes, stratigraphers using diverse tools from traditional fossils to astronomical cycles to database programming, and geomathematicians. Anticipated advances during the next four years include formalization of all Phanerozoic stage boundaries, orbital tuning extended into the Cretaceous, standardization of radiometric dating methods and resolving poorly dated intervals, detailed integrated stratigraphy for all periods, and on-line stratigraphic databases and tools. The geochronological science community and the International Commission on Stratigraphy are focusing on these issues. The next version of the Geologic Time Scale is planned for 2008, concurrent with the planned completion of boundary-stratotype (GSSP) definitions for all international stages. [source]