Search Results (294)

There are discriminatory, structured, opaque human rights violations that keep the socioeconomically vulnerable subservient, a social problem that goes against the core Christian principle: humans are created in the image of God and all share equal dignity. Studies show that sociocultural, political, and economic elements are available in society, which form into clusters, namely social representations, helping people to categorize others and interact with her/him. They carry with them the historical consciousness, providing the people with social-living tools such as social identity and the like. The qualitative empirical research conducted among the Catholic youth of Tamil Nadu, India, showed that the enslaving semantic elements contained in the social knowledge facilitate the youth to affiliate with a group and to disaffiliate from another. Caste-ridden endogamic semantic elements are part of this knowledge. This affects individual as well as social cognition. Therefore, besides conceptual understanding, epistemological approaches are necessary to eliminate the enslaving elements contained in social knowledge. This is possible through the Ego–Alter dialogue. Ego stands for an individual, group, institution, movement, or anything similar. Alter can stand for social knowledge, which is available in society. Full article

Across the centuries, trees have been recognised as one of the oldest lifeforms on earth, witnessing and subject to the passage of time on a scale that far exceeds human life, telling us who we are in the world. This paper explores the intricate nature of human interactions with trees across a broad chronological and conceptual range, and the cultural, symbolic, and ecological meaning of “iconic” trees, drawing upon a selection of case studies to explore and analyse the relationship between the tree as a living organism and its cultural, textual, and mnemonic meaning. In conducting this, it reflects upon the cultural geographies of presence and absence, and the role of emblematic trees as places of memory and structures of belief. The relationship between human life and the life of trees is shown to be symbiotic; multiple cultural values and symbolic forms are ascribed to trees, and those same trees shape the physical, ecological, and human environment. The social and cultural construction of the landscape and sites of memory is presented as a key component in the formation of narratives and mentalities that define the relationship between humans and iconic trees, material and imagined. Physical, ecological, and cultural erosion, it is suggested, have the capacity of memorialising forgetfulness and creating a space in which the absence of presence and the presence of absence co-exist. The iconic image of the fallen tree, in its presence and absence, exposes the extent to which trees are also human objects, constructed and understood in human terms, and subject to a range of personal, political, and pragmatic impulses. A tree can be iconic not simply because of what it was but because of what it was believed to be, integrating a physical, historical, memory, and ecological or cultural space into our relationship with the natural world. Full article

While studies consistently show that the popular media often provide medicalized images of disabled people as “other” or inferior, dynamic societal changes, such as the diffusion of human rights laws, increasing public awareness, and the mediatization of disability activism, also influence media representations. The present research aims to identify relevant discursive practices in Hungarian online news media, a non-Western European country with about 50 years of a state party system under communism, and offer insight into how progressive policy changes and mediatized activism shape media features on disability. To establish the dataset, the most visited and independent online news media portal in Hungary (24.hu) was searched for articles discussing disability between 2019 and 2022. The 481 relevant articles extracted were analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the help of MAXQDA 2020. The findings reveal a multiplicity of disability representations: medicalized and victimized images on the one hand, and reports of resilience and “heroism” on the other. Three distinct discursive practices are identified: (1) traditional/ableist representations, (2) alternative representations with ableist framing, and (3) agency and the co-creation of disability representations. Results suggest that even 30 years after the political changes, disabled people’s collective agency is marginal in Hungary, and that socio-legal changes and mediatized disability activism are yet to influence news media features. Full article

Ancient paintings are an intangible window to the economy, politics, and customs of the past. Their characteristics have evolved or were made obsolete, with only limited contemporary connections remaining. This research aims to preserve and to interact with characters in 2D paintings to evolve their cultural identity through combining AI and AR. The scope of this research covers traditional Chinese paintings archived by the National Palace Museum in digital collections, mainly “New Year’s Market in a Time of Peace”. About 25 characters were used for training and 3D reconstruction in RODIN^®. The models were converted into Augment^® and Sketchfab^® platforms as reactivated AR characters to interact with new urban fabrics and landscapes. Stable Diffusion^® and RODIN^® were successfully integrated to perform image training and reconstruct 3D AR models of various styles. As a result, interactions were conducted in two ways: in a mixed context with mixed characters in a painting and in a familiar context in the real world with mixed characters. It was found that AR facilitated the interpretation of how the old urban fabric was arranged. Using AI and AR is a current issue. Combining AI and AR can activate ubiquitous preservation to perform recursive processing from diffused images in order to reconstruct 3D models. This activated heritage preservation method is a reasonable alternative to redefining intangible subjects with a new and evolved contemporary cultural identity. Full article

The polemics of idol worship in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria have been interpreted by previous scholars as either the author’s engagement with the Lollard image controversy or a political critique of Henry VI. This essay, however, shifts the focus from Katherine and her iconoclasm to the concept of divine iconoclasm, defined here not only as the divinely sanctioned or divinely motivated destruction of religious images but also as God’s direct intervention to dismantle false representations and correct human perceptions of the divine. It further argues that Capgrave’s Life redefines sacred space as primarily constructed through light, emphasizing its immateriality and exposing the saint’s physical limitations. In these scenarios, divine iconoclasm emerges as a constructive force that resolves the tension between the secular and the sacred. Moreover, Christ’s celestial manipulation of the vision of sacred space and the relationship between body and space—encouraging confidence while discouraging self-inflation—serves as a model for how a monarch should inspire both love and fear. In this way, Capgrave’s Mirrors for Princes is embedded within his hagiography, where the image debate features prominently, addressing the heated political and theological controversies of his time. By combining these elements, the essay bridges two strands of criticism that have previously treated the political and theological dimensions of the text separately. Full article

Background: Vaccine hesitancy (VH) is a significant public health challenge, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite extensive research on the psychological and socio-political determinants of VH, its psychophysiological mechanisms remain unexplored. Grounded in the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, this study aims to investigate the neurophysiological and affective processes underlying VH. Methods: Two experiments will assess sensorimotor resonance and affective processes in VH. In the first experiment, motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) will be recorded from the deltoid and extensor carpi radialis muscles while participants view images of people receiving COVID-19 and influenza vaccines, as well as blood injections (Block 1), and images of vial containing the same substances (Block 2). Facial electromyographic (EMG) activity will measure disgust and fear responses. In the second experiment, skin conductance response (SCR) will be recorded during a virtual reality-based fear conditioning and extinction paradigm. Expected Outcomes: We hypothesize that vaccine-hesitant individuals will exhibit altered sensorimotor resonance, higher affective responses to vaccination stimuli, and impaired fear extinction learning. Psychological traits such as disgust sensitivity, paranoia, anxiety, and dogmatism are expected to be associated with VH. Conclusions: By identifying the psychophysiological mechanisms of VH, this study will contribute to developing effective vaccine promotion strategies to address future public health emergencies. Full article

This research aims at identifying the prevalent conceptual metaphors in Kamala Harris’s discourse and analysing their role, function and significance in shaping her personal image and the image of her political opponent Donald Trump. This research was conducted using a qualitative research method and applying a conceptual framework, encompassing political discourse analysis and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Harris’s pre-election political discourse demonstrates a three-dimensional image formation model, including conceptual models as the main image shaping tool: conceptual metaphors aimed at Harris and the political party she represents; conceptual metaphors targeted at her political opponent Donald Trump; and bi-directional conceptual metaphors aimed at both competitors, but targeted at forming reverse images and evoking opposite connotations, with diverse goals. Conceptual metaphors, aimed at a positive formation of Harris’s image, include the following: STATE IS A BUILDING, STATE IS A PERSON and POLITICS IS A PLANT. A negative image of Trump is shaped upon the following conceptual metaphors: POLITICS IS WAR, POLITICS IS CHAOS, POLITICS IS BUSINESS, POLITICS IS A RACE, POLITICS IS FICTION, POLITICS IS A BURDEN, and POLITICS IS A RELATIONSHIP. The bi-directional group comprises such conceptual metaphors as POLITICS IS A KNIFE, POLITICS IS A CRIME, POLITICS IS LOVE, POLITICS IS A JOURNEY and POLITICS IS A BOOK. Full article

This study explores how auditing is evolving in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by analyzing a dataset of 465 peer-reviewed publications from 1982 to 2024, sourced from Scopus and Web of Science. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning method, the study identifies ten key thematic areas reflecting how AI increasingly intersects with auditing research. The analysis suggests that topics related to integrating AI and data-driven technologies are especially prominent. The theme “AI in Auditing” emerges as the most frequently occurring topic, comprising approximately 33.4% of the discussion. In comparison, “Data Security in Auditing” follows at 21.2%, indicating sustained scholarly concern with the integrity and protection of digital audit data. Other notable themes, such as “Auditing and Accounting Technologies” (12.7%) and “AI and Machine Learning in Auditing” (11.1%), suggest a continuing interest in the development and application of advanced technologies within auditing. The analysis also points to the presence of more specialized or emerging areas, including “Ethical AI in Audit Systems”, “Image Processing in Audit”, and “Political Influence in Auditing”, though these appear less frequently. Topics related to environmental ethics and racial and ethnic disparities in auditing were identified. However, their low representation (0.4% each) may indicate that such issues remain relatively peripheral in current academic discourse. The study provides a data-driven overview of how AI-related topics are being discussed in the auditing literature. It may help identify areas of growing interest and potential research gaps. The findings could have implications for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers by offering insights into the technological and ethical priorities shaping the field. Full article

Social cinema is a cinematographic expression used to denounce current and historical problems, as well as to identify social limits and promote the transformation of society itself. To this end, works included in social cinema depict aspects of reality to critically influence it. The objective of this study is to examine the evolution of social cinema, as well as its scientific, economic and political bases and its main consequences for the general population. Method: This study was conducted by the application of the technique of qualitative research thematic analysis as a procedure in the process of the execution of the scientific task, related to a historical trend study of the research object. The search was carried out in the databases of IMDB and the Culture Ministry of Spain. The end of the dictatorship and the beginning of democracy (1975) was placed as the historical cutting point in the analysis. Various psychosocial variables were used as categories of analysis, including poverty, work, substance use, crime, urban and rural contexts, violence, etc. Results: Spanish social cinema has evolved since its origins in the 1950s as a reflection of Spanish society. These developments, including both progressions and regressions, have been connected with social, political and economic factors. Conclusions: While the shape of Spanish social cinema has changed over time, its themes have remained similar since the origin: poverty, work and hopelessness. The evolution has not been continuous, as it has fluctuated in response to the claims and requests from the context. The Spanish social cinema has reflected topics and images from Spanish society, even when the sociopolitical context avoided them. Finally, the legitimacy of Spanish social cinema is based on its cultural strength and social/political commitment. Full article

This article critically examines the star persona of Lola Flores, an iconic Spanish flamenco artist, within the historical and political context of Francoist Spain (1939–1975). It argues that Flores’s carefully constructed star image not only persisted into post-Franco Spain but also served as a covert vehicle for the continued propagation of National-Falangist Catholic ideology. The article primarily focuses on two major productions: the book Lola en carne viva. Memorias de Lola Flores (1990) and the television series El coraje de vivir (1994). Both portray a linear and cohesive version of her life from childhood to her later years, carefully curated to defend and rehabilitate her image. While many view Flores as a self-made artist, the article argues that her star persona was a deliberate construct—shaped by Suevia Films, a major Francoist-era film studio, and media narratives that aligned her with traditional gender roles, Catholic values, and Spanish nationalism. Despite emerging in post-Franco Spain, Flores’s narrative does not mark a rupture from the ideological frameworks of the past. Instead, it repackages Francoist values—particularly those surrounding patriarchal gender norms, suffering, and the glorification of sacrifice—to ensure her continued relevance. Suevia Films (1951) played a significant role in shaping her star persona as a symbol of Spanish folklore, aligning her with Francoist ideals of nation, Catholic morality, and submissive femininity. Her image was used to promote Spain internationally as a welcoming and culturally rich destination. Her persona fit within Franco’s broader strategy of using flamenco and folklore to attract foreign tourism while maintaining tight ideological control over entertainment. Flores’s life is framed as a rags-to-riches story, which reinforces Social Spencerist ideology (a social Darwinist perspective) that hard work and endurance lead to success, rather than acknowledging systemic oppression under Francoism. Her personal struggles—poverty, romantic disappointments, accusations of collaboration with the Franco regime, and tax evasion—are framed as necessary trials that strengthen her character. This aligns with the Catholic ideal of redemptive suffering, reinforcing her status as the mater dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother) figure. This article highlights the contradictions in Flores’s gender performance—while she embodied passion and sensuality in flamenco, her offstage identity conformed to the submissive, self-sacrificing woman idealized by the Francoist Sección Femenina (SF). Even in her personal life, Flores’s narrative aligns with Francoist values—her father’s bar, La Fe de Pedro Flores, symbolizes the fusion of religion, nationalism, and traditional masculinity. Tico Medina plays a key role by framing Lola en carne viva as an “authentic” and unfiltered account. His portrayal is highly constructed, acting as her “defense lawyer” to counter criticisms. Flores’s autobiography is monologic—it suppresses alternative perspectives, ensuring that her version of events remains dominant and unquestioned. Rather than acknowledging structural oppression, the narrative glorifies suffering as a path to resilience, aligning with both Catholic doctrine and Francoist propaganda. The article ultimately deconstructs Lola Flores’s autobiographical myth, demonstrating that her public persona—both onstage and offstage—was a strategic construction that perpetuated Francoist ideals well beyond the dictatorship. While her image has been celebrated as a symbol of Spanish cultural identity, it also functioned as a tool for maintaining patriarchal and nationalist ideologies under the guise of entertainment. Full article

There is a widespread belief today, primarily among the agnostics and atheists, and even among the not so active believers, that all forms of religious belief, including Christian Catholicism, should remain outside the political realm, limited to private spirituality. This paper thematises, in the context of “positive laicity”, the way the Catholic Church changed its understanding of politics after the Second Vatican Council, regarding the involvement of believers, as serving the common good in a plural society. Using conciliar and post-conciliar documents as sources for reflection and argumentation, this paper outlines eight theological and anthropological assumptions regarding Catholic involvement in politics within the context of the 21st century, adapting the (post-)conciliar thought to the conditions of today’s globalised world. For Christians to do well in this responsible assignment, the starting point is Jesus Christ, both in the historical and in the cosmic project of God’s world in the making, expressed in the Old Testament as the arrival of God’s Kingdom. This article is methodologically limited, as the title states, to recognise and briefly sketch the content of a few basic theological–anthropological assumptions of Christian participation in politics, without going into the history of the issue, as well as to the authors who dealt with it in various aspects. In conclusion, we notice that the manner of religious action in politics described in this way presupposes that the believer has already left the state of infancy within his ecclesial community and is ready to make decisions within the political community based on his faith, competences and conscience, without clerical tutelage and obstruction. Full article

Against the backdrop of increasing herbicide resistance and societal and political objectives for reducing plant protection products, combinations of mechanical and herbicide weed control methods are gaining importance. In row crops such as sugar beet, the use of mechanical hoeing between crop rows (interrow) combined with band spraying of herbicides within rows (intrarow) can lead to significant herbicide savings compared to standard broadcast herbicide applications. However, effective weed control remains crucial. In this study, a two-year field experiment was conducted to evaluate different combinations of band spraying, mechanical hoeing, and broadcast spraying in post-emergence weed control applications in sugar beet. The weed control efficacy of each treatment was assessed relative to an untreated control using weed counting to determine absolute weed density and image analysis to quantify weed cover. Compared to the untreated control, total weed control efficiencies of up to 90.8% (weed counting) and 99.5% (image analysis) were achieved. In comparison to three consecutive broadcast herbicide applications, the mechanical–chemical combinations resulted in a similar or even superior weed control efficacy while enabling herbicide reductions of up to 65.59%. These results highlight the valuable potential of mechanical–chemical weed control combinations for herbicide-reduced weed management within post-emergence application systems in sugar beet. They represent a key tool in the context of integrated weed management (IWM). Full article

This research focuses on the detection of deepfake images and videos for forensic analysis using deep learning techniques. It highlights the importance of preserving privacy and authenticity in digital media. The background of the study emphasizes the growing threat of deepfakes, which pose significant challenges in various domains, including social media, politics, and entertainment. Current methodologies primarily rely on visual features that are specific to the dataset and fail to generalize well across varying manipulation techniques. However, these techniques focus on either spatial or temporal features individually and lack robustness in handling complex deepfake artifacts that involve fused facial regions such as eyes, nose, and mouth. Key approaches include the use of CNNs, RNNs, and hybrid models like CNN-LSTM, CNN-GRU, and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to capture both spatial and temporal features during the detection of deepfake videos and images. The research incorporates data augmentation with GANs to enhance model performance and proposes an innovative fusion of artifact inspection and facial landmark detection for improved accuracy. The experimental results show near-perfect detection accuracy across diverse datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of these models. However, challenges remain, such as the difficulty of detecting deepfakes in compressed video formats, the need for handling noise and addressing dataset imbalances. The research presents an enhanced hybrid model that improves detection accuracy while maintaining performance across various datasets. Future work includes improving model generalization to detect emerging deepfake techniques better. The experimental results reveal a near-perfect accuracy of over 99% across different architectures, highlighting their effectiveness in forensic investigations. Full article

The Darfur conflict, which emerged in the early 21st century, represents a multifaceted crisis driven by socio-political and environmental factors, with resource scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, playing a pivotal role in intensifying tensions between agricultural and pastoral communities. While climate change is typically associated with adverse environmental outcomes, an analysis of data spanning four decades (1980–2023) reveals a contrasting trend of increased precipitation, enhanced vegetation, and decreased drought frequency in recent years. This research explores the potential of these positive environmental changes to mitigate resource-based conflicts and foster political stability in Darfur as improved environmental conditions are posited to create a foundation for conflict resolution and sustainable peacebuilding. The present study integrates trends in the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to examine these shifts. EVI data, derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) at a 250 m resolution, was used to assess large-scale vegetation patterns in arid and semi-arid landscapes. The Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was employed to forecast future precipitation scenarios up to the year 2034, enhancing the understanding of long-term climatic trends. Data processing and analysis utilized advanced tools, including Google Earth Engine (GEE), ArcGIS Pro (version 3.4), and R software (version 4.3.2). The findings reveal a significant (33.19%) improvement in natural vegetation cover between 2000 and 2023, with degraded and unchanged areas accounting for 1.95% and 64.86%, respectively. This finding aligns with a marked increase in annual precipitation and a reduction in drought intensity over the study period. Historical SPEI analysis showed persistent drought events between 1980 and 2012, followed by a notable decline in drought frequency and severity from 2013 to 2024. Precipitation projections suggest a stable trend, potentially supporting further vegetation recovery in the region. These environmental improvements are preliminarily linked to climate-change-induced increases in precipitation and reductions in drought severity. This study’s findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between environmental dynamics and socio-political stability in Darfur, offering actionable insights for policy interventions aimed at fostering sustainable peace and resilience in the region. Full article

The question, what was a monastic? is a complex issue, whether in the context of China, Korea or even in the homeland of Buddhism, India. Nonetheless, this is especially so in the case of Joseon Korea due to the dramatic historical changes that took place with the Imjin War. This obviously brought about shifts not only in the social status but also in the societal role of the monastics. The most substantive factors in the late-Joseon period (1600–1910) was the loss of state patronage and no longer being under the auspices of the state. Simply put, the discussed materials in this paper evince diverse images and roles of monks that range from being state officials, laborers, soldier-monks, and Seon meditators, to thieving bandits. A single descriptor would be unable to capture the diverse identities of the late-Joseon monks. Moreover, the monastics also presented themselves as highly organized with organizational aims, no different from an organization existing inescapably in everyday socio-economic and political conditions. The shared goal of the Buddhist community, by way of presenting certain images, was to regain social recognition and legitimation, to a position of power and privilege perhaps similar to what it once had during the Goryeo period (918–1392). Full article