Rationalizing Sociality: An Unfinished Script for Socialbots

This article takes the concept and some of the existing applications of socialbots—software robots that operate on social networking sites and present themselves as human users—as an occasion to trace the evolution of online sociality. The argument mobilizes theories of social rationalization from Max Weber to contemporary critical theory to demonstrate that the appearance of automated profiles (socialbots) on social networking platforms can be seen as a logical step in the progressive enclosure of online social interaction in standardized, simplified, and trivialized forms, frames, and gestures. Critical questions concerning what the growth of robo-sociality may mean for individual users and the online public sphere are posed with a view to charting the directions for a needed public debate.     

A Strategy for the Management,Preservation, and Reutilization of Geographical Information Based on the Lifecycle of Geospatial Data: An Assessment and a Proposal Based on Experiences from Spain and Europe

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the fact that the proper management of information has to include concern for its preservation and future re-use. This ambition is particularly significant for geospatial data. The primary aim of this article is to define the European and Spanish frameworks for the preservation and reutilization of geographical information, with the ultimate goal of proposing an articulated, lifecycle-based data management model. With this, the intent is to shed some light on a complex, difficult and ever-evolving subject.

The article is divided into two main parts. The first part begins with a conceptual justification for geospatial data management and continues by synthesizing the current normative and technological framework for the preservation and reutilization of geographical information. Within this context, the implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) in Spain is evaluated. The second part begins with a case study from Spain that aims to identify different agents and flows that influence the lifecycle of geographical data, as well as the strengths and weaknesses found in each stage of the process under examination. Finally, the foregoing ideas are used in order to propose a SDI-related system for the management of geographical information.     

Child and Adolescent Predictors of Personality in Early Adulthood

This study investigated development of the Big Five personality traits from early childhood into adulthood. An initial group of 137 Swedish children were assessed eight times between ages 2 and 29 years. Initial decreases in extraversion leveled off in early adulthood; agreeableness and conscientiousness increased from ages 2 to 29; neuroticism initially increased, leveled off in later childhood and adolescence, and decreased throughout early adulthood; while openness to experience showed an initial increase, then decreased and leveled off in early adulthood. Individual developmental trajectories varied significantly, particularly in relation to gender. Personality traits became increasingly stable, and the fact that childhood scores predicted scores in adulthood indicated that personalities are fairly stable across this portion of the life span.     

Fostering Social and Emotional Skills for Well-Being and Social Progress

Children need a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional capabilities to adapt to today's demanding, changing and unpredictable world. OECD countries and partner economies recognise the importance on the holistic development of individuals. However, there are big gaps between stakeholders' knowledge, expectations and practices on how to foster such skills. This paper presents evidence on the importance of social and emotional skills; on how policy makers and schools are currently enhancing and monitoring such skills; and, on the existing gaps between knowledge, expectations and practices to mobilise these skills. The paper concludes by pointing ways in which education stakeholders can do more to better develop and mobilise the skills that drive individual's well-being and social progress. The paper draws on findings and frameworks that are being published in a full OECD report entitled ‘Skills for Social Progress: the Power of Social and Emotional Skills’ in the first half of 2015.     

Translating Ovide Decroly’s ideas to Brazilian teachers

This article seeks to analyse, comprehend and apprehend the appropriation processes of Ovide Decroly’s ideas in Brazil through the translation of his books and that of Amélie Hamaïde into Portuguese. The article discusses the following questions. Why did Brazilian intellectuals and teachers need to import Decroly’s ideas to be applied in Brazilian schools? Did the translation of Decroly’s and Hamaïde’s books play an innovative role in Brazilian society? Did the release of these books bring about changes, and did it stabilise and legitimise discourses that were already present in Brazil? Who were the translation agents of those books? First, discussions concerning travelling knowledge and cultural translation, as well as translation and the role of translation agents, are introduced. The translated books and their (production) contexts are then presented, comparing and analysing the source books and the translations. The analyses aim at understanding this journey and answering these questions, and it will be shown that Decroly’s ideas were torn apart into “pieces of knowledge” gaining life and autonomy throughout the journey, and turning into facts. It is advocated that his ideas were appropriated as “indigenous foreigners” in Brazil.     

‘Not everything that the bourgeois world created is bad’: aesthetics and politics in women workers' education

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich body of labour literature, wherein art is central in the ways she conceptualized, designed and organized women workers' educational programmes and curricula, as well as cultural activities for more than 50 years. For Cohn, however, art and politics were tightly interwoven in what I have called the artpolitics assemblage of women garment workers' life and work. It is entanglements between ethics, aesthetics and politics, considered in the light of the Rancièrian notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, that I discuss in this paper.     

Greed and Rapacity in Twilight and Vampire Academy: Kleinian Models of Maturation for Young Adult Readers

Children's Literature in Education - This paper considers the Twilight novels alongside the Vampire Academy books, as young adult readers regularly invoke these series as touchstones...