Browsing by Subject "Europe"
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Item Analyzing the association between satisfaction with commuting time and satisfaction with life domains: A comparison of 32 European countries(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2022) Maheshwari, Richa; Van Acker, Veronique; De Vos, Jonas; Witlox, FrankAlthough the majority of literature explains travel satisfaction by examining trip determinants, the interaction between travel satisfaction and satisfaction with other life domains has been analyzed less frequently. Accounting for satisfaction with other life domains is nevertheless important because the effect of trip characteristics on travel satisfaction may be overestimated without considering satisfaction with non-travel-related life domains. Hence, this paper examines the interaction between satisfaction with commuting time, satisfaction with other life domains and overall life satisfaction. An ordered logistic regression has been estimated using a large dataset comprising data from 32 European countries. Results indicate that satisfaction with specific life domains and overall life satisfaction have a significant association with commuting time satisfaction (CTS), while controlling for employment characteristics, and personality (i.e., trust). Of all life domains, job and time-use satisfaction have the strongest associations with CTS. Given the large dataset, we controlled for the contextual differences between the European countries by making a distinction between well- and less-developed countries. The result seems to suggest that all life domains and employment characteristics better explain CTS in well-developed countries than less-developed countries. This paper thus contributes to reporting other innovative ways to obtain high levels of commuting time satisfaction rather than only looking at the interactions with transport mode, travel distance and travel time.Item April in Paris, Autumn in New York: Whiteness and the Racial Formation of European Jazz in the US, 1940s–1970s(2022-04) Vad, MikkelThis dissertation charts the US reception and dissemination of European jazz and how ideas of European jazz were shaped through racialized narratives in the meeting of African American culture and European whiteness. In a series of roughly chronological of case studies, it traces how Americans wrote and thought about European jazz and explore the lives of Europeans jazz critics and musicians who went to the US.As a historiographical intervention, the dissertation responds to the fact that histories of transnational jazz in large part locate “the transnational” outside the US. The histories told in this dissertation show that the idea of “European jazz” was not only created in Eu-rope, but was also defined by discourses and music created in the US. Mobilizing critical race studies, the dissertation also argues that scholarship on European jazz has avoided the question of its overwhelming whiteness at the expense of colorblind cosmopolitan univer-salism. By focusing on how European jazz fared in the US, this dissertation highlights how the unavoidable fact of jazz’s Blackness came to set the whiteness of European jazz in re-lief. This also shows that the account of whiteness and jazz, even within the US, cannot be bounded by strict national frameworks. Chapter 1 shows how European critics were positioned in the US press as culturally superior to American jazz critics and audiences, through discourses of high-art class hierar-chies and racial whiteness. Chapter 2 explores of the US careers of the European singers Alice Babs and Caterina Valente, whose gendered whiteness was positioned as a form of exoticized Europeanness in the US. Chapter 3 is a portrait of the Austrian pianist and key-board player Joe Zawinul, who used narratives of miscegenation, racial passing, and “soul” in ways that rely on the fundamental instability of racial markers but also on his white privi-lege to tell such stories. Chapter 4 is a case study of the most prominent European jazz rec-ord label, ECM, which built an identity as a European label upon the already established American ideas of European jazz, specifically its high-art status, “serious” approach to mu-sic, “pure” sound production, and whiteness. The research presented herein reveals that Americans used the specter of Europeanness for their own purposes, reshaping American jazz discourse through transatlantic juxtaposi-tions. Most consistently, American critics and musicians saw these fault lines as one marked by class and race, associating European critics with intellectualism and European jazz with the idea of high art (for instance, through the comparison with European classical music). European ethnicities functioned as a white privileged position from which musi-cians could negotiate their identities with African Americans, claiming both solidarity and difference. American notions of an intrinsic white, highbrow European sensibility worked to uplift jazz in the cultural hierarchy.Item Final Preparations: The Emergence of Human Agency in Christian Apocalyptic Speculation in the 10th and 11th Centuries(2020-11) Poletti, BaileyWhen people today think of the end of the world, whether from a secular or religions, serious or fictional perspective, the role of human agency and responsibility in how apocalyptic events occur is often of central concern. In many cases, humans believe that we have some control over if, when, or how we meet our collective end, being able to cause, prevent, delay, accelerate, or alter the course of the End Times. In the early Christian Church, however, this was not a common assumption. Instead, Christians believed they were passive witnesses to God’s unfolding plan. There was nothing humans could do to change this divine plan in one way or the other. All that humans were capable of was preparing themselves and their neighbors for the common Last Judgment that everyone would face, whether or not they ever experienced the apocalyptic drama. If one were to find themselves living in the last days, Christian advice to that person was the same as if they lived under normal times. No special actions were necessary regarding the apocalypse. This “tradition” lasted for hundreds of years into the Middle Ages. In the 10th and 11th centuries, however, a new tradition emerged in the Latin West. This traditional, inspired by seventh-century Byzantine politics and Irish penitential missionary work, coalesced in the Ottonian and Capetian remnants of the Carolingian empire. Through a combination of political and religious concerns, especially involving preaching throughout the extended Gorze monastic network within and beyond Lotharingia, a new apocalyptic tradition emerged alongside the old, one that both assumed and argued for the necessity of human participation in the divine plan in order for the apocalyptic drama to begin. This tradition was involved in many large-scale social movements throughout the 10th and 11th centuries, culminating in the start of the First Crusade in 1095. From that point onward, though the old tradition never vanished, this new tradition of humans believing they could be responsible for causing, preventing, or otherwise altering the timing and course of apocalyptic events became endemic in European Christianity. This study demonstrates when, how, and why this tradition emerged.Item Orientalist knowledges at the European periphery: Norwegian racial projects, 1970-2005.(2010-05) Myrdahl, Eileen MullerIn this dissertation I examine recent Norwegian racial formations. I argue that whiteness has become an increasingly central aspect of productions of Norwegian national identity. Furthermore, I show that the racializing processes first established in the early 1970s continue to be reproduced and shape Norwegian society today. The dissertation focuses on three disparate but interlinked sites. First, I discuss the experiences of postwar Southern and Eastern European migrants in Norway, based on interviews with 12 migrants. I argue that these migrants are produced as white in a qualitatively different way from non-migrant Norwegians who are seen as white. Furthermore, I suggest that the apparent production of the migrants' children as white and Norwegian shows that Norwegian forms of whiteness are less dependent on tracing descent to Norwegian territory than has previously been suggested. Secondly, I trace the changing discourses of race and migration that culminated in the 1975 "immigration stop" legislation. I argue that at the beginning of the decade Norwegian understandings of immigration were not heavily dependent on constructions of race, but that they became so within a few years. Using close readings of policy documents, the Parliamentary debate on the "immigration stop" and newspaper coverage from the entire period, I show that the development and passing of the legislation was dependent on, and in turn codified, racial constructs that saw some migrants as always already excessively different. Lastly, I argue that imperatives to love-and romance-based marriage that is evident in Norwegian family reunification law constitutes a racial project - one that can be seen as an extension of the processes of racialization that were established in the 1970s. I also suggest that arranged marriages queer in relation to Norwegian heteronormativities. In the conclusion I point both to the continued reiteration of race in Norway, and to forms of opposition to the racial productions that I have discussed. I argue that international perspectives on racial formation provide analytic dexterity that is necessary if Norwegian racializing processes are to be interrupted.Item We were all in the resistance": Historical Memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in the Netherlands"(2020-07) Contreras, Jazmine“‘We Were All in the Resistance’” examines contested cultural memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust through an analysis of the monuments, museums, educational programs, and commemoration ceremonies that shape memorial culture in the Netherlands. Focusing on moments of tension and debate, my dissertation explores how victim-centered organizations, state institutions, and the local and national government interact with one another and the public on the development of new memorial spaces. Employing the concepts of collective and cultural memory, I examine the impact of sites and spaces of memory on both Jewish and non-Jewish understandings of the occupation period and Dutch identity. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding these public spaces, my dissertation highlights the importance of representations of the past in supporting or condemning national narratives of Dutch resistance and victimhood during the Second World War. The first three chapters delve into debates and controversies over sites of memory within the Netherlands. The first chapter explores the dynamics surrounding different forms of monuments and their impact on interpretations of Jewish persecution and Dutch complicity. The second chapter looks at Jewish responses to an exhibit at the former transit Camp Westerbork on the internment of Dutch collaborators and National Socialist members (NSB) in 1945. The next chapter, “Memory in Crisis”, traces the narratives emerging out of public discussions on the character of the yearly May 4th Dodenherdenking (National Remembrance Day). Lastly, I examine the various public educational programs and initiatives that specifically center Jewish experiences and their role in educating the public about Jewish lives prior to and during the Holocaust. This chapter showcases the multiple layers of memory that exist in the contemporary landscape of the Netherlands and how these spaces encourage acknowledgment of the complexity of Dutch memory politics. Each chapter utilizes interviews and oral histories with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and former NSB members, museum staff, and educational program directors in order to pinpoint how public spaces have enabled the transmission of specific wartime histories and how these groups shape, push back against, or embrace national narrative of the occupation. While “‘We Were All in the Resistance’” analyzes the tensions inherent to Dutch memorial culture, the project is ultimately a commentary on the complex nature of European Holocaust memory. Despite the large numbers of Jews deported from the Netherlands during the Holocaust, the Dutch are rarely recognized as having collaborated with the Third Reich. This dissertation not only complicates the resistance narrative central to all Western European nations but forces a closer look at the ways in which Western European countries used a narrative of collective victimization in order to rationalize the development of European Union. By highlighting how Holocaust commemoration has become integral to EU values, my dissertation illustrates the strategic selectivity of Holocaust memory within European societies.