Chapter 4 explores the nature of anti-Ben Ali politics from afar. It focusses on the field of homeland politics by investigating the modalities, frames and repertoires of action used by activists who fought the authoritarian regime. The chapter highlights the ambivalent logic underlying the use of human rights, which became the main frame of contention for the various actors. For pro-regime actors, the human rights frame was paradoxically a way of legitimising the regime abroad; for Islamists, the activation of a discourse on human rights appeared as a way of circumventing the distrust to which they were habitually subjected in France; and for leftists, human rights stood as a rallying point, because fighting the Ben Ali regime during this period meant embracing the Islamists as a matter of necessity, as they were main victims of repression. The chapter goes on to investigate two further lines of cleavage that are crucial to the full understanding of long-distance Tunisian opposition politics. These lines offer a framework that determined means of action in terms of relationships with the Islamists and the degree of rupture with the Tunisian authoritarian regime.

Many applications require solving a system of linear equations 𝑨𝒙 = 𝒚 for 𝒙 given 𝑨 and 𝒚. In practice, often there is no exact solution for 𝒙, so one seeks an approximate solution. This chapter focuses on least-squares formulations of this type of problem. It briefly reviews the 𝑨𝒙 = 𝒚 case and then motivates the more general 𝑨𝒙 ≈ 𝒚 cases. It then focuses on the over-determined case where 𝑨 is tall, emphasizing the insights offered by the SVD of 𝑨. It introduces the pseudoinverse, which is especially important for the under-determined case where 𝑨 is wide. It describes alternative approaches for the under-determined case such as Tikhonov regularization. It introduces frames, a generalization of unitary matrices. It uses the SVD analysis of this chapter to describe projection onto a subspace, completing the subspace-based classification ideas introduced in the previous chapter, and also introduces a least-squares approach to binary classifier design. It introduces recursive least-squares methods that are important for streaming data.

In this chapter, the geometric description of generic branes in Yang–Mills matrix model is elaborated, and structures familiar from gravity are identified. The dynamics resulting from the classical model is interpreted as pre-gravity.

This chapter examines how the refugee crisis was framed and portrayed by right-wing actors. Its main puzzle is how the initially sentimental, humanitarian approach to the coverage of the refugee crisis was gradually transformed to present refugees as an existential threat to European societies. We track the frames and themes utilized by mainstream and radical right parties in their official speeches, documenting that utilizing a framework focusing on security and identity, they slowly managed to shift the perceptions on immigrants arriving at European shores. Furthermore, their rhetoric aimed at actively downplaying the humanitarian element, claiming instead that the search and rescue operations had perverse effects, motivating immigrants to make the crossings into the EU and worsening the refugee crisis. Therefore, in Hirschman’s terms, a rhetoric of jeopardy and perversity dominated the right's reaction to the refugee crisis, slowly eroding sympathy toward migrants.

I ask in this chapter how embodied memories of violence and survival are captured through the various sensory reconstructions of war as a sensuous world of bodily transgressions. War affects a person’s sensibilities through the engendering of a shift in sense perception owing to unexpected turns of events. I consider how a repertoire of different genres of social texts about war and violence – from songs, letters, and poetry, to autobiographies, oral histories and others – form rich and sensuous repositories. These texts undergird how multiple facets and first-hand experiences of horror and disbelief are enacted through sensory modalities that either work individually or intersectionally. As much as the sensory provide vital clues for what might happen next – in one’s home, in the prison, or at a concentration centre – the sensory also strikes fear and anxiety on what the next course of action might be. By drawing upon ontological security theory, I show how these transpire within possible or potential recourse in differing contexts of precariousness. The senses therefore serve as a potent catalyst as they both incite fear and insecurity, but also latently security and some stability as they provide cues and information for social actors.

To counter the dominant anthropocentric and synergistic framing of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights, this chapter focuses on the conflicting dimension of this relation. It maps the main types of conflicts induced from a case-law analysis of regional human rights courts. Conflicts between nature conservation policies (through the creation of protected areas) and the rights of indigenous peoples or cultural minorities living on such lands have been deplored for long, as also instantiated through the numerous cases decided by the Inter-American and African human rights Courts and Commissions. Less has been said, however, about conflicts between animal welfare concerns and cultural or religious freedoms of certain communities; conflicts between landscape preservation policies and land ownership, including by vulnerable groups such as Roma people; and conflicts between energy policies and the rights to adequate living conditions and to property. Strasbourg and Luxembourg judges are increasingly occupied with such issues. This innovative typology of normative conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights offers new empirical, theoretical and doctrinal insights to understand the nature and the extent of the conflicting dimension of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

Our knowledge of dementia stigma is still fairly limited, especially in comparison to stigma relating to mental illnesses. This chapter surveys existing scholarship and explores the historical roots of the concept of stigma and of the way different conceptions (biomedical, biopsychosocial, sociocultural and relational) of dementia generate and/or address stigma. It further identifies language, media and sociocultural structures as mechanisms that perpetuate public dementia stigma, before it turns to a number of domains in which dementia stigma can be addressed. In the domain of literature, destigmatizing efforts have attempted to generate empathy, an appreciation of complexity and insight into the condition of people living with dementia. Apart from contact-based and educational interventions, the chapter asserts that it is especially the development of 'counter-frames' that has the potential to unsettle negative perceptions of dementia. The chapter concludes by recognizing a number of methodological, conceptual and strategic challenges that complicate our evaluation of such strategies, or indeed our understanding of the complex phenomenon of dementia stigma itself.

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes.

This chapter analyzes President Trump’s remarks at the 2017 Black History Month Listening Session, in particular his repeated discussion of the seemingly irrelevant subject of “fake news.” Through a framing analysis (Goffman 1974) of Trump’s language, we make sense of Trump’s seemingly non-sequitur topic shifts and illustrate how the actions he takes through these shifts function as strategic attempts to build relationships with African American participants in the session. Our analysis illustrates how Trump strives to build relationships with his African American interlocutors through first praising well-known African American figures and then shifting frames to commiserate about the news media. While praising such figures functions as Trump’s direct attempt to align with the broader African American community, making disparaging remarks about news media functions to indirectly align Trump with the politically conservative African Americans in this interaction, sometimes through their laughter at his jokes. Like many politicians, Trump elicits support as much from his implicit relational messages as from the content of what he says.

Cultural knowledge is a fundamental part of participating in intercultural communication. Our knowledge of the world – such as history, current issues, belief systems, and values – helps us navigate both the surface-level meaning of language and its cultural significance. Cultural knowledge allows us to participate in practices in social/cultural groups (e.g., knowing how to participate in the educational system or attending prayers). Without adequate or appropriate knowledge of the context, the message of our interlocutors remains incomplete, even if we comprehend the lexicon, grammar, or pragmatics accurately. This chapter explores different ways to organize knowledge that we need to learn for successful intercultural communication and how we develop this knowledge (i.e., sources of knowledge). At the end of the chapter, key concepts pertaining to cultural knowledge are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language-teaching activities.

In this chapter, we discuss the finite element analysis of several special types of structures: trusses, beams, frames, and plates. These types of structures are defined based on their geometric characteristics and mechanical behavior. From a geometric point of view, these structures can be viewed as objects with lower dimensions: line/curve segments and thin surfaces in the 3-D space. In finite element analysis, special types of elements were created to model the low-dimensional structures on both geometric and mechanics aspects. In this regard, these structural elements can be considered as reduced-order 3-D elasticity elements. The mathematical models and finite element formulations are derived based on such model reductions or simplifications. In this chapter, we demonstrate the finite element analysis procedures for these types of structures by solving three example problems. MATLAB codes for solving the example problems are also presented.

The first opinion that is formed of a ruler’s intelligence is based on the quality of the men he has around him. When they are competent and loyal he can always be considered wise … . But when they are otherwise, the prince is always open to adverse criticism. … [A]s for how a prince can assess his minister, here is an infallible guide: when you see a minister thinking more of himself than of you, and seeking his own profit in everything he does, such a one will never be a good minister, you will never be able to trust him.