organization:university of copenhagen

Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms | Australia news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/21/indigenous-australians-most-ancient-civilisation-on-earth-dna-study-con

Claims that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed by the first extensive study of their DNA, which dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago.

Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, and reveals evidence of prehistoric liaisons with an unknown hominin cousin.

Prof Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist who led the work at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This story has been missing for a long time in science. Now we know their relatives are the guys who were the first real human explorers. Our ancestors were sitting being kind of scared of the world while they set out on this exceptional journey across Asia and across the sea.”

#peuples_autochtones #préhistoire #Australie

Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms « Wits University Press

▻http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/zimbabwes-migrants-and-south-africas-border-farms

http://witspress.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ZimbabwesMigrants_LR.jpg

During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheidera border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Focusing on one farm, this book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis. A close ethnographic study, it addresses the complex, shifting labour and life conditions in northern South Africa’s agricultural borderlands. Underlying these challenges are the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis of the 2000s and the intensifi ed pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalization and post-apartheid land reform. But, amidst uncertainty, farmers and farm workers strive for stability. The farms on South Africa’s margins are centers of gravity, islands of residential labour in a sea of informal arrangements.

In precise, limpid prose, Maxim Bolt brings to life the human ecology of a border farm. Ever alert to the counterintuitive, he shows how stability is fashioned in the midst of the unstable, and how work organises life in a time of mass unemployment. The monograph sheds light on new and important social processes. It is a significant achievement.
— Jonny Steinberg, Author of A Man of Good Hope

Ethnographies of labour and social life on large-scale farming enterprises anywhere in the world, and certainly on the African continent (including South Africa), are remarkably few and far between. Bolt’s study will stand out immediately and very prominently in the anthropology of large-scale farms and plantations regionally and globally.
— Eric Worby, University of the Witwatersrand

A thoughtfully structured and beautifully written book which … deserves to be widely read and appreciated. The book is at a unique intersection of a number of scholarly fi elds, namely labour studies, agrarian studies, border studies, and displacement and migration studies besides the broader discipline of economic anthropology.
— Amanda Hammar, University of Copenhagen

#zimbabwe #migrations_pendulaires #migrations_frontalières

Sentencing Private Manning
▻http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/sentencing-private-manning

Given the amount and nature of documents Manning disclosed, what penalty would, under international standards, be considered proportionate to the harm caused?

To answer this and related questions, the Open Society Justice Initiative together with an academic at the University of Copenhagen recently undertook a survey of the laws and practices of 20 European countries.

All of the surveyed states prescribe criminal penalties for the disclosure of classified national security information. However, where there is no spying, treason or disclosure directly to a foreign state, the penalties are far less than in the US: up to two years in Denmark and Great Britain; four years in Spain and Sweden; five years in Belgium, Germany, Poland and Slovenia; and seven years in France.

Moreover, prosecutions are rare. In six countries—Albania, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Spain and Turkey—there has not been a single conviction in the past 10 years. In another 11 countries, there have been less than a handful of prosecutions, and even fewer convictions. Russia is the only country surveyed in which significant numbers of prosecutions have resulted in penalties of more than three years, including, and disturbingly, for the disclosure of human rights violations.

Géographie et émotions. Moi j’aime bien l’idée, mais j’ai aucune idée de ce que ça donne. Je référence pour explorer plus tard.

“Feeling Space: Towards a History of Emotion, Affect, and Space”

Workshop at the University of Copenhagen
December 6th and 7th, 2013

Keynote speakers:
Professor Monique Scheer, University of Tübingen
and Professor Tim Cresswell from Royal Holloway University of London

The spatial dimension of emotions and affect is currently attracting
increased attention among historians employing a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The main goal of this workshop is to bring together historians who focus on the multiple, mutually constitutive relations between spaces and affect/emotions in different historical contexts. Spatial formations such as classrooms, cityscapes, courts, battlefields, laboratories, churches, and homes can be seen as emotionalized through different embodied practices. Conversely, specific locations may simultaneously enfold and shape emotions.

We would like to address questions such as: How have space, affect, and emotions interacted in different historical contexts? How and to what extent can such interactions be traced? How may historical inquiry help us understand spatial politics of emotion? We invite papers from scholars who approach these themes in different historical and geographical contexts.

Conveners: Assocociate Professor Dorthe Gert Simonsen University of Copenhagen, Assistant Professor Mikkel Thelle, Aarhus University, and Postdoctoral Fellow; Karen Vallgårda, University of Copenhagen. The workshop is funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research and Aarhus University.

#géographie_critique #géographie_des_émotions_et_des_sentiments

2012 Border Aesthetics Conference - Universitetet i Tromsø

Voilà une d’initiative géniale : c’est quelque chose de très créatif, un mélange improbable et des sujet originaux

[Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen): “Credit Crunch. Re-negotiating the Border between Fiction and Reality”]

par exemple

►http://uit.no/publikum/konferanse/konf?p_document_id=307130

5-7 September 2012 University of Tromsø, Norway

Scope of conference:

This conference will investigate how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices. In so doing, it draws upon two guiding observations that must inform any notion of a border aesthetics, these being a) that aesthetic theories and practices regularly invoke and engage with notions of the border; and b) that borders are in turn capable of producing aesthetic effects and can themselves be conceived of as aesthetic objects. Papers can focus on the literature, film, photography, visual design, urban planning, and video art to name but a few examples. Also work produced by creative artists working in or imagining border regions will be welcomed. In particular, the Barents Region and the Mediterranean are important areas of study but we also will consider – and encourage – investigations of other regions.

#art #frontières #murs #cartographie #visualisation #cartographie-radicale