https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/697 2026-06-16T15:39:56Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/147476 Title: Embodied civic intimacy : small states, symbolic power, and the lived experience of democracy Abstract: How is democracy embodied in everyday life, and how can lived experience enrich how we measure it? Procedural indices offer fine-grained measurement of institutional architecture but capture less of the affective, embodied, and reputational textures of civic life in small, densely networked polities. Mainstream political sociology compounds this gap by centring large Western states and reducing small-state democracies to narratives of clientelism or elite capture. This thesis develops Embodied Civic Intimacy (ECI), a mechanism most legible in small state conditions but portable to compressed publics more broadly, to explain how compliance, dissent, and belonging are negotiated where visibility and proximity are inescapable, and where democracy is constituted through bodies, silences, and rituals as much as through institutions. The analysis is organised around three strands: the infiltration of elitism, the state management of dissent, and civil society's navigation of patronage networks. The question matters increasingly as compressed visibility, long characteristic of small states, now diffuses through digital publics and surveillance capitalism. Malta and Singapore are compared through a most-similar systems design: postcolonial island states sharing density and colonial inheritance yet diverging sharply in regime trajectory. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design integrates political ethnography, forty elite interviews, discourse analysis, and longitudinal V-Dem and Freedom House data (2004–2024), with divergence between strands treated as analytical evidence rather than measurement error. Extending Bourdieu's symbolic violence and building on Machin's embodied democracy, the thesis shows that despite divergent index scores, both states display convergent civic textures in which neutrality is conspicuous, absence is legible, and silence carries political weight. ECI operates through reputational sanction rather than material inducement or legal coercion. The contribution is empirical (small-state experience), theoretical (a relational, affective lens for ECI), and methodological (enriching quantitative indices with embodied evidence). Description: Ph.D.(Melit.) 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/147434 Title: Introduction : deconstruction and twenty-first century thought, part 1 : the new realisms Authors: Lynes, Philippe; Young, Niki Abstract: In his 2018 article ‘État present: Post-Deconstructive Thought and Criticism’, Ian James identified four thinkers whose reception had produced what he called a ‘post-deconstructive naturalism’ in contemporary scholarship–François Laruelle, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler–each of whom had ‘taken up and developed deconstruction in ways which echo Derrida’s thought but which, at the same time, emerge as distinctly un-Derridean’ (James 2018, 85). For James, the ontological, materialist, and realist concerns shared by these four had served to further open the humanities onto engagements with the natural sciences. Questions of physical materiality, energy, organic life, ecology, and artificial intelligence now dominate scholarship in animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, posthumanism, and speculative realism. Since 2018, however, three of these thinkers have passed away: Stiegler in 2020, Nancy in 2021, and Laruelle in 2024. [extract] 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/147370 Title: CounterText : volume 12 : issue 1 Authors: Callus, Ivan; Corby, James Abstract: - Table of Contents:; Editorial; Kevin Hart : The CounterText Interview. At the Margins of Mystery - Kevin Hart and Robert Farrugia; Guest Editors’ Introduction: Frame/Framing - Paweł Kaczmarski and Marta Koronkiewicz; This is going to be about everything; or, Framing the Limits of the Post-Literary - Ivan Callus; Organic Unity in the Age of the Free Market: The Pragmatist Tradition and the Question of Frame - Adam Partyka; Rimbaud Framing Kiefer Framing Joyce - Rod Mengham; One Moment, Two Frames: The Peripheral Coast - Dragana Rankovic; Easels Warped My Flesh; or, Could Ansel Adams Win the World Press Photo of the Year? - Mateusz Zaboklicki; Framing Yourself: Autofiction and Form - Zuzanna Sala and Łukasz Zurek; Gordonalia: an excerpt from Situations - Ansgar Allen; Notes on Contributors 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/147358 Title: Editorial [CounterText, 12(1)] Authors: Callus, Ivan; Corby, James Abstract: It feels almost inevitable that the previous number of CounterText, a special issue on the theme of Omission/s, should be followed up with a number centred on Frame/Framing. What to include when not omitting, and how, in that act, to (re)frame criteriologies, conceptualities, ideas, practices, and more, becomes a theme that carries both consequence and continuity across the journal’s pages. There is, in fact, a case that could be made for reading the two issues together, even though they are each their own individual project. Each emerges from separate CounterText roundtables, with the one on Frame/Framing taking place at the Faculty of Letters in the University of Wrocław, 24–25 January 2025 and convened by Paweł Kaczmarski and Marta Koronkiewicz, this number’s guest editors (the prior issue is linked to a roundtable that took place at the University of Naples, Parthenope, in June 2024). 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z