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For the past 25 years in Greece, welfare-state reforms have been the result of the interplay between domestic politics and European influences. While pension reform has been aborted, some targeted and small-scale reforms have proven more successful. Wholesale changes of the welfare system have met with strong resistance from private interests and bureaucratic mechanisms. The EU's impact has mostly been felt in the policies of employment, vocational training, regional development and, less so, social assistance. Other welfare-state reforms have remained mostly on paper. However, the Greek welfare regime is gradually undergoing a cognitive change, manifested in the diffusion of social rights, and has adopted EU-driven policy tools for consultation and decision making. Throughout, path dependence has interacted with reform dynamics, flowing from the country's integration into the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their 'cases'. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants' bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that 'enacts' the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the 'capacity to act' within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one's life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to question whether and how instrumentalization of refugees by states impacts their media representations, based on the example of a border spectacle that took place in March 2020, when Turkey unilaterally opened its borders to the West, causing hundreds to flock to the land border with Greece and to the coasts of the Aegean Sea. In many ways, this ended up as a failed border spectacle, especially for international publics: Turkey appeared neither as a strong state nor as a benefactor of asylum-seekers. Yet, the paper claims, the spectacle nonetheless led to an ordering of the visibility of asylum-seekers that cannot be captured on the victim-threat spectrum across which they are usually represented. Examining Turkish mainstream TV evening news as well as state agencies' Twitter accounts, the paper traces how Greece was made hypervisible through the use of three frames (humanitarian, legalistic and moralistic) and asylum-seekers were reduced to extras (figurants) in the process. Such an ordering of visibility facilitated the re-moralization of instrumentalization of refugees and may have accordingly shaped the response-ability of citizens. The figure of the extra enables us to link refugee visibilities to splintering moral geographies of asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper describes the cooking installations found inside a specific building, Building C, in the Late Neolithic site of Kleitos 1, their morphological and functional diversification, how they changed and evolved throughout time, and their spatial arrangements. Building C provided the stratigraphic information required by the authors to discern two distinct chronological phases, during which a significant change took place in the characteristics and organisation of the cooking facilities in the building. Building C underwent a transformation from a household unit during phase A to a medium-scale gathering place, capable of hosting a certain number of people, in Phase B. The identification of Building C as a medium-scale gathering place is based on the quantity and quality of its cooking facilities in comparison both to findings in other buildings on the site and to two well-explored Neolithic contexts of large-scale gatherings in Northern Greece, Makriyialos and Promachon-Topolniča. This is the first time a medium-scale gathering place has been recorded in Neolithic Greece. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of multi-scalar gatherings and the broader variability witnessed in social dynamics and site organisation in the Late Neolithic period of Northern Greece (late 6th to early 5th millennium cal BC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the relationship between the severe economic crisis facing Greece and the country’s social protection system, arguing that this relationship is ambivalent. On one level, the welfare state itself has contributed in a far from trivial way to the fiscal crisis of the state, with its various failures including huge deficits in key programmes such as pensions and health. On a second level, the crisis and the measures to counter it deprive the welfare state of resources, while at the same time setting in motion sweeping changes. On a third level, social protection can help cope with the consequences of the crisis, but enhancing its capacity to do so will require considerable reconfiguration and proper funding of social safety nets. The paper concludes by discussing the prospects for a revival of welfare state building in Greece in the current harsh climate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the concept of hospitality as a metaphor for thinking about the relationship between European publics and refugees. In particular, it explores how audiences in Greece discuss the European 'refugee crisis' and how, in doing so, construct hierarchies of deservingness of hospitality among different migrant groups reaching the Greek borders. Drawing upon empirical material from focus group discussions, the paper argues that these hierarchies of migrants draw upon media narratives, broader political discourses and cultural beliefs about religion, gender and class. Hospitality, as a metaphor for engaging with the stranger, is illustrated as embedded in national sociohistorical contexts, underlined by stereotypes both about the 'other' as well as the national self, and ultimately limited in constructing relations of solidarity between hosts and newcomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of reference management software in the context of academic work and research is the main subject of this study. The study focuses on the extent to which postgraduate students at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, one of the largest Greek universities, make use of – or avoid using – reference management software tools to organize their bibliographic databases and to automate the process of creating references and citations. The study also tries to find out which are the key factors for their choices and whether certain background characteristics affect their behavior. It should be mentioned that no previous studies have been conducted in Greece regarding the use of reference management software in the academic environment. An online questionnaire was sent to the postgraduate students at the University and a result set of 545 responses was collected and analyzed. The majority (almost two-thirds) of the respondents identified themselves as non-users and one-third identified themselves as reference management software users. Among the latter, Mendeley was found to be the software used by more than two-thirds of the users and was followed by EndNote and Zotero. It is worth mentioning that Mendeley is the software officially recommended by the University's central library to its users but most of the students (more than 60%) were not aware of this fact. In terms of background characteristics, the analysis revealed, among other things, statistically significant relationships between degree level, student discipline and preferences, reference management software features, and potential future use of reference management software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assimilation of more than one million Anatolian Greek refugees into the social, economic and political life of Greece following its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) accounts for much of the conflict that defined the period of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–1935). The impact of the refugees on the traditional balance of mass politics at the electoral level, is well documented; their contribution to the electoral gains of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the 1930s gave legitimacy to the communist threat and ultimately served as a pretext for the suppression of competitive politics and the end of republican governance. The nature and extent of refugee identification with communism is not well understood in the historiography, however, and remains largely based on the male refugee vote, even though the adult male refugee population accounted for a minority of the refugee population. The census of 1928 reported an 'abnormally high' number of widows and girls, especially among the refugees of Asia Minor, as all the males of military age (18–50) had been retained by the Turks as hostages during the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922, and many of them had perished before their release. This paper begins an overdue examination of generational radicalization outside the ballot box, among the ranks of refugee youth, and young women in particular, the group regarded by contemporaries as most vulnerable to the excesses of liberal cosmopolitanism in the new 'motherland'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope of this paper is to examine the environmental and economic performance of an alternative household fermentable waste (HFW) management paradigm, developed within the framework of the HORIZON 2020 project Waste4think. In Greece, the business-as-usual scheme for the management of HFW is its disposal in landfills as part of mixed waste. Waste4think developed an alternative approach based on the benefits of source separation. Specifically, source separated HFW is taken to a drying/shredding plant, located in the municipality, for the production of a high-quality biomass product called FORBI. Alternative approaches have been examined for the exploitation of FORBI. In this work, the use of FORBI as an alternative fuel for the cement industry is assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) tools. The results show that the proposed HFW management framework performs better than the baseline scenario both in economic and environmental terms. However, focus should be given to the optimisation of the drying/shredding process in order to reduce its energy intensity and environmental loadings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the legal debates of nineteenth-century Greece and the attempts to produce a legal framework following the establishment of the modern Greek state. These debates had both a practical significance since such a framework was essential for the creation of a modern state, and an ideological one since the chosen framework would be a statement about how the new state perceived itself, its history, and its place in Europe. These questions were particularly relevant in the case of civil law as Greek legal scholars contemplated whether to accept the use of customary law, or to reject it, and if so what laws should replace it. In this paper, I examine this debate within the context of European legal developments and the process of codification undertaken throughout Europe from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as the ideological and practical implications of the debate.I argue that, despite the belief that the efforts of Greek legal scholars led to the elimination of the use of customary law from the Greek judicial system, my research in the archival material of the Appeals Court of Athens indicates that customary law was still dominant a generation after the establishment of the modern Greek state. I conclude that a re-examination of the role and practices of the Greek courts in the nineteenth century is much needed as their flexibility thirty years after the creation of the Greek state is closer to the legal pluralism of the courts of the Ottoman period than to the model advocated by the contemporary legal scholars who demanded a ‘modern’ judicial system to assist the renaissance of the Greek nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary psychiatry is its firm grounding in a neurological and biochemical framework for the interpretation of mental life and its disturbances. In the absence of any strong neurological understanding or systematic knowledge of active pharmaceutical substances, one might expect that early ancient medicine readily resorted to non-somatic approaches to healing mental suffering. Instead, what is usually labelled "therapy of the word" and other forms of what one may call psychotherapy emerge relatively late in Greek medicine, only in the first centuries of our era. This paper provides an overview and analysis of this development in ancient history of psychology, philosophy and medicine, covering a broad period of time from the fifth century BCE to the end of the late-antique period, the fifth century CE. The focus is on the very idea (or lack thereof) of the curability of mental disturbance, and on the particular branch of therapeutics which addresses the psychological and existential condition of the patient, rather than his or her physiological state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The library and information science field attempts to legitimize its position in higher education, in a 'culture of uncertainty', where boundaries are fluid. The position of LIS in the hierarchical classification of academic subjects is influenced by the changes in both the field of higher education and in the information environment, creating expectations for the emergence of new fields of study, research and professional practices. The purpose of this paper is to examine how LIS students position themselves in their field of study and the resources they use in processes of meaning-making. Data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with students from the three LIS departments operating in Greece at the undergraduate level. The results showed that the academic knowledge content of the object, the assignment of scientific characteristics to it, the signifier of the book, the form of professional practice and, above all, technology are the most prominent resources among those that most young people utilized in their effort to negotiate the symbolic class (i.e. the dominant cultural categories which give meaning to the social world). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship among length of educational training, social origin and residential segregation in Athens using a large sample of 130,000 young individuals 15 to 27 years old, as recorded in the 2011 census. Hypotheses based on high binary correlations between the length of training and a number of variables indicating social origin and the social status of residential areas were tested with a generalised linear mixed model to determine the significance of the influence of these variables on the length of educational training. A separate analysis was conducted for each age group, roughly corresponding to education levels – upper secondary (15–18 years old), undergraduate (19–22 years) and postgraduate (23–27 years). It was assumed that at each level the range and the shape of the socially and spatially unequal access to education would be significantly different. A scenario regarding the city's important vertical segregation was also explored. It was assumed that living on different floors in the vertically segregated apartment buildings of the city's densely built central neighbourhoods might be significantly related to the length of educational training, even after controlling for social class/status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of radical socio-economic-technological developments, the Library and Information Science sector in Greece is undergoing a series of changes in a dialectic relation with technological changes. Libraries in Greece have a long history, from the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle in the 5th century BC to the transition of the National Library of Greece at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. This paper aims to provide an overview and record the milestones signifying the beginning of the changes happening in every aspect of the Greek LIS landscape. In addition, it aims to highlight the changes in the Greek library scene, extending from synergies and networks to new library buildings, as well as the role of LIS education and lifelong learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to explore the perceptions of secondary education teachers in Greece about their students’ information literacy skills and to investigate whether teachers have incorporated some form of information literacy instruction into their teaching to help students familiarize themselves with the research process. Qualitative methods of data collection and analysis were used, as the study sought to illuminate individuals’ opinions and understanding of the meanings and values of information literacy, not quantification of responses. The primary method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. The transcripts were analysed thematically using the Atlas.ti software package. The study revealed that information literacy skills are developed in the school context chiefly by the assignment of school work or research projects. Almost all teachers were very critical of students’ information skills, but they were not fully aware of how to teach information skills, and the most common way of teaching information literacy was giving advice about specific sources. They appreciated the need to prepare information literate students but they reported various problems in their effort to apply research-based teaching. The paper provides an empirically based, enhanced understanding of students’ information literacy competencies from the teachers’ point of view. It also raises the issues of the content, structure and organization of information literacy experiences offered in the context of secondary education, from the teachers’ perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pensions played a key role in the Greek fiscal crisis of 2010. This paper analyses a specific failure of pension system governance: the possibility of manipulating the vague boundary between social policy and occupational pensions. The vagueness of the boundary arises from the dual nature of pensions — as instruments of social and corporate policy. Where first pillar pension provision is segmented, this boundary can be fudged, giving rise to the possibility of appropriating public subsidies for occupational pensions. Though the implications of this for equity were understood long ago, change was finally imposed by the obligation to account for pension promises under International Accounting Standards. The indirect effect of this was to force the demarcation of an upward boundary to social policy responsibility. This paper, after setting up the analytical issue, outlines its manifestation in Greece, and examines the solution given in 2005—6. This methodology has acquired wider significance by being employed by the European Commission as an instrument in the analysis of issues of state aid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A rational approach for developing optimal municipal solid waste (MSW) management plans comprises the strategic and the detailed planning phases. The present paper focuses on the former, the objective of which is to screen management alternatives so as to select the ones that are able to fulfil all legal and other management requirements with reasonable cost. The analysis considers the transportation, treatment and final disposal of the commingled wastes that remain after the application of material recovery at the source programmes and comprises 10 elements, four of which are region-dependent and the remaining ones application-dependent. These elements and their inter-dependencies are described and the entire methodology is applied to Greece. The application considers the existing regional plans and shows that they are incompatible with the existing EU Directives, as well as overly expensive. To address this problem, a new plan is developed in accordance with the rational planning principles of the present methodology. The comparative evaluation of the above alternatives shows that the existing regional plans, in addition to being incompatible with the applicable EU Directives, require 4.3 to 4.8 times (3.7 to 4.4 billion ) higher capital investment and their annual cost is at least 2.1 to 2.3 times (590 to 735 million year —1) higher in comparison with the new national plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For hundreds of years, the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been subjected to the — not always welcome — attentions of external powers, finally gaining some independence from Britain in 1960. Since then, Cyprus has been the object of three international crises, almost leading to war between NATO members Greece and Turkey. Following a Turkish invasion and occupation which continues to the present, tensions have continued, while Turkey continues to occupy over one-third of Cyprus, an EU member, while trying itself to gain entry to the organisation. Papers released by British government departments in January 2008 reveal the following: an increasingly submissive yet tetchy attitude in British foreign policy formulation vis-à-vis American pressure (mainly Kissinger) on Britain not to leave Cyprus; the question of the USA financing the British bases; British government criticism of Turkey's perceived intransigence in finding a solution to the Cyprus conundrum; British government criticism of Turkey's position on its continental-shelf dispute with Greece; Britain's strong support for Turkey's European aspirations, flying in the face of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Cyprus' recommendations; past and future President Clerides' seeming contentedness with the British military presence on Cyprus; and a marked difference between French and British views. The article concludes that the British government submitted to US demands and suggests that Cyprus remains a cat's paw of big-power politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with clusters of post-industrial urban economies and their impacts on the spatial restructuring and the relandscaping of the contemporary inner city. It investigates such impacts by studying recent economic, spatial and landscape transformations of Athens, a large Mediterranean city in the geographical and economic periphery of Europe. The first part of the paper reviews earlier research on clusters of post-industrial urban economies and their spatial impacts, while attempting to present the topic in an international context. The second part focuses on a case study of Athens, Greece. It examines the planned clusters of athletics, culture and leisure that were developed for the 2004 Olympics; and, the spontaneous clusters of both culture, leisure and creative activities, and technology-intensive and knowledge-rich activities and advanced financial intermediary services that have gradually developed in Athens' inner-city areas during the past decade. The paper documents land use shifts and landscape transformations while highlighting the processes of formation of these spontaneous clusters and the urban policies involved; it also discusses urban governance issues in relation to the management of Athens' clusters, both planned and spontaneous. Finally, it draws conclusions about differences in post-industrial trajectories among large cities in the core of Europe and large Mediterranean cities in the developing periphery of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to clarify the institutional context and local framework of landed property relations in the local development patterns of a rural space converted into an urban tourist resort on the island of Rhodes, Greece, through the diachronic analysis of cadastral data on land property ownership and non-market land property transfers and acquisitions. Direct and indirect state policies, land property structures inherited from the past, formal and informal institutions enabled agents to establish enterprises of varying types and size. Socially dispersed landownership is a structural resource that, through agency, influences local development patterns and land property is repeatedly implicated in the local production and reproduction system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of past lake-level changes in Lake Xinias covering the last 40 000 years was presented in an earlier paper. In that paper, changes during the Holocene were only briefly dealt with, because of poor sedimentary representation. In this paper a supplementary transect of cores is described, in which Holocene lake-level changes are better recorded. The correlation of the cores was based on pollen and lithostratigraphic analyses, and a curve was constructed showing recorded lake-level changes. The curve from Lake Xinias was compared with an earlier compilation of lake-level changes from the Balkans, mainly from Greece. The compilation shows rising lake levels during the earlier part of the Holocene, and successively lowered levels during the later part. Most lake levels were high between about 8000 and 5500 cal. yr BP. The reconstruction from Lake Xinias indcates similar changes during the early and late Holocene. However, it differs by indicating a lowering in lake level, culminating around 7000 cal. yr BP, interrupting and dividing the period of mid-Holocene high lake-level stand. Further studies are required to show if this lowering in Lake Xinias was regionally representative and caused by climate change, or was caused by tectonic disturbance locally affecting lake level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation 'from below'. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of 'urban solidarity spaces', focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making 'from below', and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a 'politics of fear' and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the 'Athens of crisis', between 2012 and 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution offers a critical engagement with the Critical Commentary paper of Beveridge and Koch (2017) entitled 'The postpolitical trap? Reflections on politics, agency and the city'. I argue that post-politicisation as a particular form of de-politicisation does not imply the disappearance of politics. On the contrary, it involves the re-ordering of the modalities of politics (contentious or otherwise) and of the possibilities of the political with far-reaching consequences for the modalities of egalitarian and emancipatory urban change. I explore the key contours of the post-politicisation argument and develop the thesis that 'the political' can never be foreclosed fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pursues a translational approach to the securitization of migration. It argues that sociotechnical processes of identification at the border can be conceived of as translations into legible identities of individuals who are unknown to authorities. The article contributes to the materiality debate on securitization across Critical Security Studies (CSS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by answering the call to conduct empirical explorations of security, and by revisiting the potential of the early sociology of translation (i.e. actor-network theory) to account for the identification of border crossers. Data collection was conducted at four identification facilities in the Hellenic Republic. Three sets of implications for the CSS-STS debate on the materiality of securitization are discussed. First, a translational approach can replace a representational understanding of identity with a performative apprehension of identification. Second, adopting a translational approach leads to acknowledge that the identification encounter is mediated by multiple, heterogeneous actors. It thus helps to open technological black boxes and reveal the key role of material qualities, affordances and limitations of artefacts. Third, a translational approach to the securitization of migration can help advance the field of 'alterity processing' by appreciating the de facto re-arrangements of institutional orders elicited by techno-political alignments with global security regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the results of an experimental recycling programme forpackaging waste are reported along with general data on recycling inGreece. The recovery project was carried out in northern Athens by the Hellenic Recovery and Recycling Association (HERRA) and two municipalities (Maroussi and Vrilissia), with the scientific support of theUniversity of Aegean. it was the first multi-material, 'close-to-home' bin programme in Greece and served 68 000 people. Almost 50 tonnesper week of recyclables were collected and processed in a material recovery facility (MRF) where they arc sorted and baled into nine different products (four kinds of plastic, three kinds of paper, aluminium, steel) and glass. Up to May 1995, the calculated diversion rate was 7%, and the recovery rate was 30%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the background of the relation of religion and modernity in Greece from a historical and cultural perspective. As in most parts of the world so in Greece modernity has had a serious impact on both the church as an institution and on religious culture at large. Secularization has been a dominant process in Greek society and culture since independence and even before. Compared with other European countries, however, Greece is less secularized and the decline of religion as well as the advancement of modernity presents certain idiosyncratic patterns. The mainstream culture and social structure in the west as a whole has been moving along the same path of social change. Namely the path of modernity. The paper argues that for various special, historical and cultural reasons this has not been the case in Greece. On the political plane, because of its cultural and historical role, Greek Orthodoxy has been, implicitly and explicitly, one of the central ideological pillars of the modern Greek nation state. As a consequence of the constitutional position of Orthodoxy as the official religion of the country the Orthodox Church has lost its essential institutional autonomy to the state.

This paper presents an integrated approach to assess Holocene environmental changes in the Sperchios delta, Sperchios rift, central Greece. A multidisciplinary study was carried out applying established analytical methods as well as exploring new techniques to detect past environmental conditions in a fluvio-deltaic depositional system. A series of six deep boreholes, up to 50 m long, and four shallow cores, up to 6 m long, from across the delta plain, were studied in detail. Sedimentary facies were defined by changes in grain size and macro- and microfaunal composition. Variability in mineral magnetic composition documented by changes in bulk magnetic susceptibility (χ and χ77K/χ293K) and remanence parameters (S−300 and σARM/σSIRM ratios), as well as down-core elemental variations obtained by scanning micro-x-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF), provide constraints on the depositional changes related to the evolution of the Sperchios delta. Correlations between elemental data derived by µ-XRF analyses and grain size were also analyzed and used to further constrain the facies interpretation. Overall, these Holocene sediments reveal a transgressive–regressive succession overlying pre-transgressive terrestrial deposits of Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene age. Furthermore, 13 new 14C radiocarbon dates constrain the transgression rate to be ~3.5 m/yr for the Early Holocene and the regression rate to be ~1 m/yr for the Late Holocene. The Sperchios delta plain developed when the rate of sea-level rise decreased ~6000 cal. yr BP as it has been proposed for the broader area of Aegean Sea. This study demonstrates that the combination of techniques used here provides a powerful way to map out paleoenvironmental changes and thus the 3D stratigraphic architecture of Holocene sedimentary successions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multidisciplinary studies in coastal systems of the eastern Mediterranean region have proven to be excellent tools in understanding paleoenvironmental, paleoecological, and paleoclimatic changes that took place during the Holocene period, and how these changes interacted with urban development and growth. This paper presents sedimentological, high-resolution x-ray fluorescence (XRF scanning), micropaleontological, and x-ray diffraction (XRD) data from three shallow sediment cores that were retrieved from Aliki (ancient Siphai or Tipha) salt pond. The study area is located in a unique, highly tectonic geographical region, at the northeast part of the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. Beachrock deposits that form a barrier between the salt pond and the marine environment seem to play an important role in the evolution of the area. The chronological framework was set at around 3100 cal. BP by four 14C radiocarbon dates, and the evolutionary model that was established indicates four different changes taking place during this period at the study area. From around 3100 to 1600 cal. BP, a transition from a closed to an open lagoonal environment was identified, interrupted by a fluvial terrestrial deposit at around 2500 cal. BP. A shift toward a closed lagoonal system at around 1600 cal. BP and the establishment of a salt pond environment seem to correlate with tectonic activity. The study provides important information about the evolution of coastal landscape in such a tectonic active region and points the interaction between regional human activity and climatic changes during the late-Holocene period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study pursues a line of inquiry into male and female candidates' political campaign strategies on Facebook, drawing a sample from the 2019 National elections in Greece. The findings suggest that both genders disseminate one-way campaign information and address a wider palette of political issues than the ones typically associated with their gender. Some stereotypical patterns regarding traits and issue expertise seem to persist; females are more expressive in terms of visual content and use of emoticons, choose personalization and dialogic communication more frequently and emphasize culture and women's issues. Men are more often associated with negative campaigning, prioritize "masculine" issues such as employment and foreign affairs, and generate a greater level of user engagement. The results indicate that social media do not constitute an alternative communication channel that equalizes existing power structures. Instead, they seem to reflect the status quo and may hinder women candidates' efforts to gain visibility and communicate with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the representation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper and their recontextualisation through the prism of crisis. I focus on speech representation as a recontextualisation device that serves as a bridge between speech production and text consumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the discursive framing of the crisis by focusing on the ‘speakers’, namely the social actors who are represented as speaking, the actions in which they are involved and the power role relationships established between them. I argue that a polarised image of crisis is constructed and that the framing of the Greek elections in this particular broadsheet results in double-voicing that positions Greece as either dependent on or independent of Europe. This double-voicing seems to contribute to the maintenance of domination and social control and helps sustain dominant discourses circulating in the broader socio-cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes the case that Greece has witnessed a transition from a ‘post-democratic’ condition in the ’90 s and the early 21st century to a regime of ‘post-political biopower’ in 2010–12 that can bid democracy farewell. To adequately theorize this modality of power in a way pertinent to contemporary Greece, the paper takes its bearings from Agamben’s take on biopower, the homo sacer and the endless state of exception. But the analysis fills in Agamben’s theoretical skeleton by drawing on Naomi Klein’s account of the ‘Shock Doctrine’, which captures a particular technique of biopower deployed by neoliberal hegemony, Deleuze’s insights about the ‘society of control’ and Lazzarato’s elaborations of these insights with reference to the ‘indebted man’, which can shed light on the political implications of the Greek debt crisis. Yet popular responses, initiatives and electoral politics, as well as the intricacies of dominant power relations, upset any monolithic and quasi-totalitarian account of sovereign rule, disclosing cracks, imbalances and dispersion in its edifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates tourism demand for Greece with annual Greek tourism revenues from 1975 to 2009. The paper builds on an earlier study by including tourism revenues for Italy, Spain and Turkey as possible tourism substitute countries for Greece. Greek tourism is found to be price elastic, suggesting that a return to the drachma and depreciation would increase tourism revenue in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular and well-established image of scientists and science dominates in the public field, signifying a contradictory and multifaceted combination of stereotypes. This paper investigates crucial aspects of the visual self-image of Greek scientists and science as exposed in photographic material retrieved from relevant institutions’ websites. In total 971 photos were analysed along dimensions corresponding to the image of scientists and science. Analysis demonstrates ambivalence in Greek scientists’ self-images between traditional stereotypic characteristics and an intention to overcome them. Differences between the self-images of physics, chemistry and biology are determined, as well as between the “masculine” and “feminine” face of science. Implications concerning improvements in science and scientists’ self-images and further research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the high rates of female full-time employment in Portugal and examines whether these are consistent with the familialistic features that typify the southern European social model. It employs a comparative methodology to investigate the extent to which recent policy developments and current social values in Portugal are aligned with the familialistic southern European tradition or whether they signal a departure from the model. The analysis reveals that the high rates of female employment are associated with particular features of the case of Portugal, namely, lower gender-based labour market segmentation and welfare state support for dual-earner families. However, this study also shows that the country still retains familialistic characteristics, which are particularly visible in the organization of care and in the persistence of traditional gender values. The article contributes to debates on the southern European social model and sheds light on how high female employment levels can be compatible with relatively high levels of familialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a comparative study of land use and demographic development in northern and southern Greece from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Results from summed probability densities (SPD) of archaeological radiocarbon dates and settlement numbers derived from archaeological site surveys are combined with results from cluster-based analysis of published pollen core assemblages to offer an integrated view of human pressure on the Greek landscape through time. We demonstrate that SPDs offer a useful approach to outline differences between regions and a useful complement to archaeological site surveys, evaluated here especially for the onset of the Neolithic and for the Final Neolithic (FN)/Early Bronze Age (EBA) transition. Pollen analysis highlight differences in vegetation between the two sub-regions, but also several parallel changes. The comparison of land cover dynamics between two sub-regions of Greece further demonstrates the significance of the bioclimatic conditions of core locations and that apparent oppositions between regions may in fact be two sides of the same coin in terms of socio-ecological trajectories. We also assess the balance between anthropogenic and climate-related impacts on vegetation and suggest that climatic variability was as an important factor for vegetation regrowth. Finally, our evidence suggests that the impact of humans on land cover is amplified from the Late Bronze Age (LBA) onwards as more extensive herding and agricultural practices are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how income poverty is affected by changes to the scale of tax-benefit policies and which are the most cost-effective policies in reducing poverty or limiting its increase in seven diverse EU countries. We do that by measuring the implications of increasing/reducing the scale of each policy instrument, using microsimulation methods while holding constant the policy design and national context. We consider commonly applied policy instruments with a direct effect on household income: child benefits, social assistance, income tax lower thresholds and a benchmark case of rescaling the whole tax-benefit system. We find that the assessment of the most cost-effective instrument may depend on the measure of poverty used and the direction and scale of the change. Nevertheless, our results indicate that the options that reduce poverty most cost-effectively in most countries are increasing child benefits and social assistance, while reducing the former is a particularly poverty-increasing way of making budgetary cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is recognized as a priority waste stream internationally, mostly due to their volume and hazardousness. This paper presents an analysis for the quantification of WEEE management cost for Greece, taking into consideration scenarios for reverse logistics network’s development and WEEE volume scenarios. Transportation cost, which represents a major cost element for any reverse logistics network, is modelled with the use of mathematical programming, targeting towards the optimization of locations for the development of required intermediate storage infrastructures. Additionally, overall operational cost and recycling fees are estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban heat island effect and its consequences is one of the most important problems cities worldwide have to face in an effort to become more sustainable. This paper presents a study of a major open area in a densely built and populated area in the centre of Athens that was part of a Municipality of Athens program to improve thermal comfort conditions in open spaces. The bioclimatic rehabilitation design process was based on a specific strategy involving detailed monitoring of the thermal characteristics and climatic conditions in the area, extensive analysis of the results in order to define the problem, design and use of efficient passive cooling techniques (cool materials, green spaces, solar control and earth to air heat exchangers), and the use of advanced simulation tools to evaluate and optimise the planed microclimatic improvements. The results indicate that the proposed measures contribute to a decrease in local temperatures of up to 2°C for summer conditions.Practical application:• The knowledge on perceptions of microclimate in outdoor space can serve as a basis for urban spatial design.• To evaluate the application of cool materials in public urban squares.• Strategies to improve local microclimate with monitoring and modelling the design features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Metallurgical slags are by-products of the iron and steel industry and are subdivided into blast furnace slag and steel slag according to the different steel-producing processes. In Greece, slags are mostly produced from steelmaking using the electric arc furnace process, and subsequently are either disposed in a random way or utilized by the cement industry. Steel slag has been recently used, worldwide, as hard aggregates in wearing courses in order to improve the skidding resistance of asphalt pavements. At the Highway Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki research has been carried out in the field of steel slags, and especially in electric arc furnace (EAF) slag, to evaluate their possible use in highway engineering. In this paper, the recent results of anti-skidding performance of steel slag aggregates in highway pavements are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of yachting on the Greek economy. The contribution of yachting to major macroeconomic values and its impact on the Greek economy in 2004 are evaluated with the use of the tourism satellite account (TSA). The method has been applied by several countries to estimate the economic impacts of the traditionally designated tourism-related industries, as well as of all industries participating in the tourist economy, but not for the economic effects of special interest tourism (such as yachting). To date, there has been no application of this method in Greece either for the total tourism industry or for a specific tourism 'sector'. The adaptation of TSA tables, maintaining harmonization with OECD directives and definitions which are approved and accepted internationally, is a precondition of the research. To achieve the research aims, both the theoretical and empirical aspects of yachting in Greece were investigated. Data from public sources have been included in the TSA tables. Since these tables require information with economic value, which is not found in the data recorded by many public services, primary research was conducted to collect this necessary information. The paper concludes by presenting the impacts of yachting on the major macroeconomic values of the Greek economy, such as tourist consumption, gross domestic product, balance of invisible resources, national income, employment, investments and public revenues (taxes). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses the method of discrete choice modelling to evaluate tourists' preferences for two heritage attractions in Greece. This methodology offers the opportunity to gain useful insights regarding the direction of future policy actions in this important area of revenue generation. The paper provides empirical justification for the frequently cited argument in favour of the adoption of a more market-oriented rationale for an optimal use of heritage resources. Overall, the authors support the claim that Greek heritage tourism manifestations will be substantially better off if they divert attention away from the exhibits and towards specialization in accordance with visitors' preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine two theories of democracy that can be found in contemporary French philosophy. Both Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière offer a critique of modern democracy with the purpose of refounding it. The 'refoundation narratives' they propose are both based on an account of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece. According to Castoriadis, ancient democracy is grounded in a 'magma' of 'social imaginary significations' in which 'autonomy' is considered the correct response to Being defined as an insurmountable 'Chaos'. On the contrary, modern democracy defines Being as a determinacy and consequently fails to grasp the notion of autonomy. According to Rancière, the origins of democracy are to be found in the invasion of the public space by 'those without a part' who consequently have no title to govern. The problem with the 'domesticated' modern democracy is that it denies the existence of Otherness; that is, of non-citizens excluded from the public space. Therefore it appears incapable of letting the 'disagreement' manifest itself and consequently incapable of transforming the 'police' order. After examining the meaning of both theories, I attempt to elucidate the difficulties encountered by each author in the attainment of his goal, which is that of refounding modern democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction sector in Europe is among the biggest waste generators, producing 370 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste (CDW) every year, which contain important secondary materials. Quantification of CDW is important from their circular management and environmental impact point of view. Thus, the overall objective of this study was to develop a modelling methodology for estimating demolition waste (DW) generation. The volumes (m3) of individual construction materials contained in 45 residential buildings in Greece were accurately estimated using computer-aided design (CAD) software and the materials were classified according to European List of Waste. These materials will become waste upon demolition, with a total estimated generation rate of 1590 kg m−2 of top view area and with concrete and bricks representing 74.5% of total. Linear regression models were developed to predict the total and individual amounts of 12 different building materials based on structural building characteristics. To test the accuracy of the models, the materials of two residential buildings were quantified and classified and the results were compared with the model predictions. Depending on the model used, the % differences between models' predictions and CAD estimates for total DW averaged 11.1% ± 7.4% for the first case study and 2.5% ± 1.5% for the second. The models can be used for accurate quantification of total and individual DW and their management within the framework of circular economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the condition of press in Greece. It states that the decrease in newspaper revenue and circulation has resulted from the changing lifestyle of Greeks as well as the domination of television in advertising and news production. It says that the changing political style contributes to the financial crisis of the press after the suspension of loans and other help from the government. It mentions the great number of newspapers in the country as the largest source of the crisis. It adds that the Greek press is not going through a crisis but it is going through a transition stage which should be adopted by the press.

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

From the mid-1940s to the fall of the Colonels' Dictatorship in 1974, Greek society was defined by an official anti-communist discourse that divided it into 'nationally-minded' Ethnikofron citizens and left-wing 'enemies of the nation'. The article shows how this power discourse deployed visual media to construct an emotional regime of fear around communism during and after the Greek Civil War. It uncovers a large volume of propaganda imagery, including posters, illustrations, book covers, photographs, newsreels and feature films, which was used alongside texts and corporeal practices to vilify the Greek left. The article argues that the visual language of Ethnikofrosyni patterned itself on older scripts of negative othering embedded in Greek popular culture, such as lycanthropy, teratology, witchcraft, Islamophobia and Orientalism to discredit communism without engaging with its twentieth-century ideas and policies. Communists were therefore portrayed as monsters, beasts, barbarians, Muslims, Turks, Jews and unfeminine women to arouse primordial fears that threatened the deepest symbols of Greek national identity. The article stresses the centrality and relative autonomy of images in the discourse of Ethnikofrosyni and uses comparisons to unveil the processes of circulation and domestication operating across different national strands of anti-communism in the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malalai Joya, Greta Thunberg, Idle No More leaders – what do these figures have in common? They each decided to act/speak out against the failures, lacks, exclusions, violence and injustices in the words and deeds of different authorities claiming to act on behalf of (their) security and protection, and thus made visible, challenged and disrupted the dominant logics of protection on which such claim is based. More specifically, they each enacted this critique by performing a contemporary form of parrhesia – a practice in Ancient Greece that consisted in speaking truth frankly and courageously to power, taking risks in doing so out of a sense of duty to improve a situation for oneself and others. Yet none of these women stated anything radically new or shockingly unknown. So why, then, did speaking truths that were already known lead to such dire consequences and intense reactions? This article will argue that by mobilizing the frameworks of logics of protection and parrhesia together, we can have a fuller understanding of these figures' dissident truth-speaking: it is precisely their positionings within logics of protection that made their truths so daring and, in turn, it is through parrhesia that Joya, Thunberg and Idle No More activists made logics of protection visible through their disruption, opening up potentialities for 'doing' and 'being' otherwise. The dual framework offered in this article thus offers interesting avenues through which to explore resistance, truth and protection in (feminist) security studies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous process of marketization of employment relations in a variety of European countries has raised questions about the power of collective social actors and their legitimizing role in policy-making. The article examines the responses of employers' associations to institutional changes towards marketization in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The analysis exposes the hidden fractures between and within the peak-level employers' associations and unveils a variation in their strategic responses towards institutional changes. To explain this variation, the article advances a power-based explanation and argues that the institutional changes altered the associations' interest representation and power resources, which, in turn, redefined their role and identities in the employment relations system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]