Conversations With History - Major General Antonio M. Taguba
Investigating Military Conduct at Abu Ghraib
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Major General Antonio M. Taguba for a discussion of the inquiry into Abu Ghraib. They discuss the relation of the military to the rule of law and the relevance of the Geneva Conventions to the War on Terror. In the discussion, the general analyzes the problems he found at the Abu Ghraib prison and talks about the aftermath of the investigation in Washington and for his career.
Line Engh, Research fellow, The Norwegian Institute in Rome / Department of Philosophy, Classics,
History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo
http://www.minervaberkeley.org/conferences/seeing-knowing-vision-knowledge-cognition-and-aesthetics/2014-speakers1/line-cecilie-engh/
Seeing and knowing with the bride of Christ: How a metaphor shaped thought and action in the middle ages
My talk is about how and why a specific metaphor – the bride of Christ – emerged from the world of theological texts and came to shape central aspects of the ideological and institutional development in later medieval Europe. As bridal imagery moved between the ideological hothouse of the cloister and the political and pragmatic arena of the reform papacy, it engendered complex ideological models that established and negotiated both the institution of marriage and structures of political hierarchies in Western Europe. Imbued with specific inferences regarding nurturance, fecundity, femininity, and sexuality, bridal imagery was then distributed to the wider population by means of marriage sermons.
Here it seems we have a clear instance of figurative language impinging on political, cultural, and institutional processes, rather than just vice versa, as is more commonly construed. But how are we to assess implications of imagistic thinking as being intrinsic to broader cultural processes? How did bridal imagery produce and propagate cultural meaning? In what ways were concepts and representations of mystical marriage mapped onto other ideas, and how did those mappings result in new conceptions and representations? And more broadly still: How can visual thinking have social and political impact?
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