In her article, Barbara M. Stafford argues for the conception of literacy that would encompass visual skills besides the traditional emphasis on verbal competence. Image itself is important, not merely the information it may convey. Moreover, a more extensive notion of education is necessitated by the process of radical perceptual and conceptual changes that have been occurring since the Enlightenment and are all-pervasive in Postmodernism. The new-found power and ubiquity of images needs to be recognized in order to surpass the limitative, yet enduring Platonic distrust in visual culture. Medical,environmental, physical, legal, and other practices have nonetheless profoundly benefited from the technologies of visualization.Examples from the 18th century visual endeavors such as preserving fragmented cultures, exhibition of diversity, and the externalization of somatic experience show, how images challenge the restrictions of human comprehension. With the advent of visual and electronically generated culture, the time is ripe to edify images from their low status.Visual cognition as the crucial element of knowledge should be reflected in a hybrid art-science, public policy, as well as pedagogy., Barbara Maria Staffordová., and Obsahuje bibliografii
This article revisits the case for paying more attention to agency and strategy in theories of post-communist politics and society. The author analyses two trends of major social and political significance in Central and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2007: the apparent political inconsequentiality of rising unemployment and the causes and consequences of the dramatic decline of organised labour, across a wide variety of political and institutional settings. While the prevailing explanations have emphasised the institutional and ideological legacies of the communist past, the author points to theoretical reasons for why the 'unsettled times' of transformation may have been particularly conducive to elite agency. Looking beyond legacies can shed light on the degree to which elites have channelled the expression of workers' reform grievances towards socially peaceful but, possibly, politically illiberal repertoires of expression. Pointing to past developments across a number of advanced and developing democracies, the author situates the post-communist labour decline within a larger comparative and historical context. Lastly, the author indicates how the erosion of labour power has influenced the particular models of democracy and the varieties of capitalism that have been emerging in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989.