Search

The Notre-Dame de Paris fire offers anthropologists in the field of critical heritage studies a rich opportunity for fieldwork and conceptual innovation. This paper examines the social repercussions of a monument's destruction, ranging from emotional responses and public involvement to local and global consequences. The paper also includes the project lines of a broader comparative survey on reactions to the destruction of cultural heritage. A team of social scientists created a comparative grid in order to describe and analyze a series of case studies: Notre-Dame de Paris (France, fire in 2019), the National Museum (Brazil, fire in 2018), Notre-Dame de la Merci (France, fire in 2017), and Coventry Cathedral (UK, bombed in 1940 during WWII). The comparative grid is as follows: - Practices and Reactions: Emotion and Mobilization Regimes Heritage disasters provoke a wide range of privately and collectively expressed reactions that frame these events as a social construction. How do citizens and institutions navigate the outpouring of emotion elicited by the destruction of a monument? - Consequences: The Nature of Heritage Items and Their Social Impact Laypersons and authorities assign different meanings to heritage items according to their cultural and political significance and material and intangible features. How does such representations of a ravaged monument influence its reconstruction process and future relevance? - The Social Fabrication of Memory and Narrative The destruction of a heritage object rapidly triggers a series of narratives, including legal documents and authorities' statements, that constitute a textual memory of the disaster. What standards define catastrophe narratives, and what do their retellings of the event reveal or obscure? - Heritage in Crisis: Catastrophe as Social Construction of Heritage Fragility Heritage is by nature fragile and requires continuous preservation. How does the destruction of monuments galvanize collective representations of the endangerment of heritage? - Temporality and Spatiality: Catastrophe as an Event in Time and Space Although the destruction event is often short-lived and localized, it reveals enduring values and concepts of past and future, as well as geographic place. How are temporality and spatiality reimagined after the loss of a heritage object? - The Right to Heritage: Reconstruction, Citizenship, and Cultural Policies Although often conceptualized as isolated events, the destruction of heritage objects is deeply embedded in their economic, cultural, and social context. What do the destruction and reconstruction of heritage reveal about power dynamics and economic inequalities? - The Limits of Reflexivity: Researchers as Actors Facing the Politics of Mourning As researchers, balancing personal commitment with heritage and ethical scientific inquiry is crucial to sound analysis and to the validity of research results. How should scholars simultaneously manage the experience of and the study of emotional responses such as rage or grief? This paper illustrates these points using vignettes from selected case studies. The project is part of the working group EMOBI, a broader ethnographic project on collective emotions and mobilization following the Paris cathedral fire (social sciences working group of Chantier Scientifique Notre-Dame , supported by the CNRS and the Ministry of Culture). The goal is to provide a comparative study of the stakes and repercussions of devastated heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a seven-year longitudinal survey conducted from 2016 to 2022, examining e-book acceptance among first-year undergraduate students in the information management program. Targeting students who were new to their educational journey and had minimal exposure to academic contexts, the study used convenience sampling to gather data from 301 participants. Employing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we assessed four dimensions of e-book acceptance: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Attitude Towards Using, and Behavioral Intention to Use E -books. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) validated these dimensions, indicating a robust model applicable to a broader undergraduate student population. The results highlighted strong interrelations among these factors, with significant implications for academic librarians. Notably, from their initial exposure, students associated e-books primarily with a source of new information, rather than as a time-saving tool. Although e-books were perceived as easy to use, this aspect did not strongly influence students' attitudes and intentions to use them as much as their perceived usefulness did. The study reveals that students, particularly in social sciences, have long viewed e-books as a vital technology for exploratory knowledge acquisition. While they perceive e-books as easy to use, this perception likely stems from their habitual use for managing learning activities, rather than from recognizing any added value of the technology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA) is a new approach to quantitative intersectional modelling. Along with an outcome of interest, MAIHDA entails the use of two sets of independent variables. These include group demographics such as race, gender, and poverty status as well as strata which are constructs such as Black female poor, Black female wealthy, and White female poor. These constructs represent the combination of the demographic variables. To operationalize the approach, an initial random intercepts model with strata as a level 2 context is specified. Then, another model is specified that includes the strata as well as the demographic variables as level 1 fixed effects. As such, it is argued that MAIHDA uniquely identifies the additive and intersectional effects for any given outcome. In this paper we show that MAIHDA falls short of this promise: the strata are an individual-level composite variable not a level 2 context. Rather than being analogous to neighborhoods as contexts, strata are analogous to socio-economic status which is a combination of individual-level demographic variables, albeit often presented as a group-level characteristic. The result is that the demographic variables are inserted in both level 2 and 1. This duplication across the levels in MAIHDA means that there is a built-in collinearity across the levels and that the models are mis-specified and, therefore, redundant. We conclude that single-level models with the demographic variables and interactions or with the strata as fixed effects are still the more accurate models for quantitative intersectional analyses. • There has been limited analysis of the MAIHDA method. • We compare MAIHDA to traditional HLM. • We show that strata are a level 1 composite variable not a level 2 context. • We identify duplication and collinearity in this approach. • We advocate for single level models in quantitative intersectionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Research integrity is understood in terms of academic and professional integrity. • Honesty, responsibility, and respectfulness are important researcher values. • Limited presence of research ethics committees. • Human participant research ethics is an individual responsibility. Central Asian (CA) countries have been actively developing their research and knowledge production systems. However, inconsistent alignment with international research ethics norms creates challenges for researchers in CA to equally participate in global knowledge production. Based on quantitative survey responses of 296 social science researchers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, this paper explores social scientists' understandings of international principles and practices of human participant research ethics. The findings show that CA social science researchers focus on a broad understanding of research integrity, focused on academic and professional integrity. The respondents highlighted the importance of individual researcher values such as honesty, responsibility, and respectfulness. With only 35 % of the respondents reporting the existence of a research ethics committee (REC) at their institutions, most respondents believe that human participant research ethics are an individual rather than an institutional responsibility in Central Asia. This study has implications for developing research and policy in other post-Soviet and emerging research contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]