Higher Education Academy

Είναι ένα παραμύθι που μου το έλεγε η γιαγιά μου όταν ήμουν μικρή. Θυμάμαι πως έκανε εβδομάδες να το τελειώσει, προσέθετε ή αφαιρούσε στοιχεία, άλλαζε την ιστορία κι έτσι πάντα της ζητούσα να μου το ξαναπεί. Μία πιθανή του προέλευση βάση μίας μικρής έρευνας που έκανα είναι η Θράκη. Κάποια στιγμή θα ήθελα να ασχοληθώ εκτενέστερα με αυτό το ζήτημα, προς το παρόν όμως σας το παραθέτω όπως το είχε συγκρατήσει το παιδικό μυαλό μου και όπως ένιωσα ότι ήθελα να το αποδώσω εγώ σε γραπτό λόγο. Πρόκειται δηλαδή για μία προσπάθεια διασκευής. Ελπίζω να το ευχαριστηθείτε, όπως το ευχαριστιόμουν κι εγώ κάθε φορά που μου το διηγιόταν η γιαγιά μου, την οποία και ευχαριστώ γι' αυτό και εύχομαι τώρα που θα το διαβάσει να το βρει αντάξιο όλων εκείνων των ωρών που αφιέρωσε για να μου το μάθει.

The 20th century marked a revolution of the body. It was eventually set free from restrictive ideologies and, on the contrary, it started (per)forming ideologies itself. Modern dance is the child and simultaneously the abettor of this revolution, initially developed by the pioneer Isadora Duncan at the late 19th century. Contemporary dance, where every movement is dancing, is the most liberated technically and artistically style of modern dance, thus the one closer to Duncan’s kinaesthetic legacy, nowadays adapted by many women and men choreographers / dancers world widely. Surprisingly, even though Duncan’s dance theories incorporated a part of the “ancient Greek civilisation”, itself the stepping stone for the modern Greek state, they were dismissed by the Greek popular culture at that time, to reach a vacant place for Greek men in contemporary dance in the 21st century Greece. Discussing moments of the global, Balkan and Greek cultural history of the 20th century comparatively, this presentation conceptualises, at a first level analysis, this non-relation of Greek men with contemporary dance. Methodology further includes qualitative and quantitative data focusing mostly on young-adult men, filtered by the researcher’s personal perspective as a non-professional contemporary dancer: contemporary dance enables “the body we are” to explore its kinaesthetic spectrum and thus perceive the self and the world.

In this short essay, I am trying to show how Clifford Geertz's fieldwork research on the Balinese cockfights, which can be seen as social comments the Balinese people make themselves for themselves, can be explained with the notion of habitus, which comes into practice bodily, as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. The former appears to be immensely inspired and affected by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach of the body. In specific, here I address the issue of how perception results from the senses of the body and then how, embodied as it is, it creates habitus. The navigating question upon which this argument is built, is whether the cockfights can also be seen as an actual resolution of conflicts in Bali, or merely as a performance of them.

This paper approaches and questions the notions of a continually proved-to-be relationship with the Greek state, as this was narrated by some of our informants during a short fieldtrip in a Greek minority village of Southern Albania; specifically, of the ones largely perceived as intellectuals by the community. It questions not so their validity, nationalistic as most of these notions appear to be, but the degree to which they could be differentiated and how they are being constructed by the identity of a Greek minority villager and, furthermore, of a dominant " Northern Epirus " legacy. To achieve that, the writers also adopt a comparative reading of published works by such intellectuals and discuss their arguments with other members of the Greek minority found far from the border zone, in Athens. Life-narratives are quoted for a more accurate depiction of the informants' perspective, focusing mostly on the experience of Albania's communist past. Finally, the Albanian-Greek borders are proved to be anything but solid for these people, who develop a discourse around history, culture and politics to promote and justify their stance on their minority status; this stance being sometimes rigid and some others negotiable. The theoretical background of the paper is mainly Anthropological, but theories from History, Psychology and Political Sciences are also revisited.

Κότσιρα Ελένη Ημερίδα: «Εθελοντική εργασία: Πίστη σε έναν καλύτερο κόσμο ή εκμετάλλευση της καλής πίστης;» Εταιρεία Αποφοίτων Κοινωνικής Ανθρωπολογίας Παντείου Πανεπιστημίου, 13 Μαΐου, Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο Κοινωνικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών.

At the early hours of Tuesday 26 September 2017, a heavy deluge flooded extensive parts on the island of Samothraki and forced the local authorities to declare a state of emergency. Damages were caused in the traditional settlement of Chóra and in numerous areas of the natural landscape, many protected under the European Natura 2000 scheme and preserved for the UNESCO MAB Biosphere Reserves scheme. Most of the municipal services had no longer a base to operate from.

This presentation will refer to specific ethnographic poems and answer how poetry can be used as a means to access emotions and experiences in the field that resort in the subconscious, that elude us. Focusing on the personal and collective trauma caused in the aftermath of a natural disaster in a small island mountainous community, I am asking how such emotionally loaded experiences can be a step forward for the ethnographer to understand the troubles of the community. As many others have previously suggested, poetry is the genre that depicts experience par excellence (see for example, Bachelard, 'The Poetics of Space' (1969); Lyotard, 'The Lyotard Reader' (1989)). Therefore, I am introducing poetry as an alternative method of data recording and revisit the challenges of perceiving the collective through the solitary, and yet environmentally immersed, practice of verse writing.

This presentation will refer to specific ethnographic poems and answer how poetry can be used as a means to access emotions and experiences in the field that resort in the subconscious, that elude us. Focusing on the personal and collective trauma caused in the aftermath of a natural disaster in a small island mountainous community, I am asking how such emotionally loaded experiences can be a step forward for the ethnographer to understand the troubles of the community. As many others have previously suggested, poetry is the genre that depicts experience par excellence (see for example, Bachelard, 'The Poetics of Space' (1969); Lyotard, 'The Lyotard Reader' (1989)). Therefore, I am introducing poetry as an alternative method of data recording and revisit the challenges of perceiving the collective through the solitary, and yet environmentally immersed, practice of verse writing.

This paper identifies and discusses a list of early drawn similarities between two otherwise different disasters, namely the flooding of the valley of Thessaly, in Greece, following Mediterranean storm Daniel in September 2023 and the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August 2005. I argue that while the two hazards are not comparable, the reasons why the two locations flooded are. Likewise, similarities can be found in the ways the people affected experienced these two disasters, which were primarily driven by socioeconomic and not natural factors. Setting off from the position that, given the global attention and amount of scholarly work on disaster management that followed Katrina, the wrongdoings of 2005 should have been avoided 18 years later, and further motivated by the long-lasting impact the floods in Thessaly are expected to have both for their survivors as well as the Greek state more broadly as the climate crisis deepens, this comparative analysis is provided so that any future national disaster risk management plan does, at the very least, make use of lessons already learnt from previous disasters.

Supervisory negligence is a form of concurrent negligence where the prohibited result is caused by the negligence of more than one medic; it is not a form of joint negligence. The criminal liability for supervisory negligence is underpinned by the “new negligence theory”. Introducing a theory for supervisory negligence can help solve the difficult issues raised in negligent offences where the prohibited result is caused by the accumulating effect of more than one medic’s negligence. To prove supervisory negligence, it must be shown that there is supervisory relationship, that the supervisor has failed to fulfil his duty of care and that there is causation between the supervisor’s negligence and the prohibited result. The reliance principle should work as a restraint in determining criminal liability for supervisory negligence.

Cyber bullying involves the use of network information and communication technologies to support the deliberate and aggressive conduct that has been carried out repeatedly over time, which intends to cause another distress, disturbance or harm. There are three main categories of offences in English criminal law to deal with cyber bullying cases, namely offences against two of the Communication Acts, harassment and stalking offences and offences involve other people’s indecent photos and films.  Most of the cyber bullying cases fall into the category of harassment and stalking offences.  Chinese criminal law, by contrast, does not have as many offences as its English counterpart to deal with cyber bullying.  English criminal law gives protection to individual’s rights including the general personality right of not being disturbed, the right to privacy, the right to sexual autonomy, property rights and the right of human dignity; such a comprehensive legal framework has very positive implications to Chinese criminal law in term of combating the rampant spread of cyber bullying.