Faculty of Arts

This dissertation aimed at exploring the field of nonverbal communication (NVC), highlighting and identifying some of the main contributions to the scientific research in the field. Furthermore, the concluding chapter was devoted to the application of the research on NVC to the sphere of politics, in order to underline its connections to the perception of leadership.
The way theories and facts are presented is meant to be chronological, although the aim of this work is to merge together different approaches to the subject, with the linguistics approach serving as overarching framework.
The second chapter is entirely focused on one of the most common applications of the theoretical studies on NVC: politics.
Since the positive implications of a powerful non-verbal communicative behaviour have been foregrounded, many experts identified its potential when applied to fields where persuasion plays a crucial role, such as teaching, marketing, sales, negotiation and political campaigns.
I chose this topic after I developed a strong interest in the verbal counterpart of communication, which was one of the core courses in the final year of my undergraduate studies. My aim was to delve into the different aspects of communicative behaviour displays and to develop a broader picture of the recent studies on human communication.

The debate about why art is to be taught at school and the role of the art educator is still open and quite vivid. Art is also difficult to evaluate, since it is connected with so many intangible aspects of the human mind: first and foremost, creativity (Winner, Goldstein, & Vincent-Lacrin, 2013). Do we teach art to develop creativity or does creativity leads to the comprehension of art? Should art be taught as a subject per se or as a tool to promote 21st century skills? What are the goals of an art teacher nowadays?
In this paper, I will try to analyze the possible answers to these questions in the light of the perspective provided by the art teacher whom I could interview during our visit at ArtEZ School of Art.
“I didn’t know I could” will be the guiding concept into this study: I will try to extrapolate the implied meaning of this sentence and to understand its entailments.

In the era of web 2.0 social media are widely used as an instrument for connecting people of all over the world and exchanging informations. Social media truly reached remote areas and some ethnic groups such as Kenyah Lebu' Kulit of Sarawak, Malaysia – a minority ethnic group living on the edge of Sungai Asap who speaks an endangered language – are taking advantages of it thanks to the creation of some communities inside a social media, in this case Facebook. The communities of Lebu' Kulits on Facebook are mostly divided in private groups and public pages in which they share cultural contents and informations between those who still live on the upstream and those who live in the new 'kampung' on the downstream, after the relocation. Through this preliminary work it will be analysed what happens to a language of a minority ethnic group when it joins in a virtual environment, if there are some external linguistic influences and what conclusion can be assumed by a linguistic identity already threatened. However, there are some questions related to this work that are: Can a social network be seen as a way of preserving and documenting an endangered language? If so in which way? It will be shown an overview on which way Facebook is used by Lebu' Kulits with some statistic data analysing the usage of this language both in private and common groups (community) made by them; what this ethnic group thinks about social media and then a preliminary language documentation resulting of this work by cooperating with some members of the community itself.

The Heritage Theatre is a book about cultural heritage and globalisation. Cultural heritage is the  stage on which the global community, smaller communities  and individuals play out their similarities and differences, their identities and singularities. Cultural heritage forms an implicit cultural code governing the relationship between parts and the whole, individuals and communities, communities and outsiders, as well as the relationship between communities and the world as a whole. Cultural heritage, by way of its producers, its products and its audience, presents an image of the world and its inner coherence. 

The subjects in this book range from places as distant from each other as Dar-es-Salaam, Jakarta, Amsterdam, Le Creusot, Trinidad, Brazzaville, Bremerhaven, New York and Prague, and deal with themes such as wayang, Kylie Minogue,  airports and heritage,  modernist architecture in Africa  and the impact of DNA research on the concept of roots.

The volume is based on papers presented on a conference organised by the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication of Erasmus University Rotterdam.  The authors have backgrounds in cultural studies, art history, anthropology, museum studies, sociology, tourist studies and history. 

NOTES ON THE EDITORS

Marlite Halbertsma is Full Professor of Cultural History in the Department of Cultural Studies at  ESHCC of  Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Alex van Stipriaan Luïscius is professor of Caribbean History at ESHCC of Erasmus University Rotterdam as well as curator Latin America and the Caribbean at the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam.

Patricia van Ulzen is a lecturer at the Dutch Open University, School of Cultural Sciences.

Karel Appel was in de jaren vijftig zó bekend, dat zelfs kinderen hem herkenden en zijn handtekening vroegen. Hij was een BN-er avant la lettre. Hoe is dat zo gekomen? Was hij veel in het nieuws? En was hij bekend om zijn werk of om andere redenen?

‘Is Rotterdam een cultuurstad?’ Over geen enkele andere Nederlandse stad wordt deze vraag zo vaak gesteld. En het steeds weer stellen van de vraag betekent dat er twijfels zijn, dat het niet vanzelf spreekt dat Rotterdam een cultuurstad is, ook al beweren nog zoveel mensen ten stelligste van wel. De twijfel komt vooral doordat cultuur in de traditionele, klassieke zin van het woord niet past bij de identiteit van Rotterdam. Toch vormt het Rotterdamse beton wel degelijk een perfecte bodem voor een bloeiende cultuur. Maar deze cultuur is nét even anders dan de klassieke, hoge cultuur en vooral ook nét even anders dan de cultuur van Amsterdam.

Chapter 3 of book 'J.C. Ebbinge Wubben. Museumdirecteur met een missie',  Boijmans Studie 12, Rotterdam 2016.
Chapter 3, entitled 'Kosmopolitische allure: de Bodonvleugel', is a study of the extension of the museum in 1970 by architects Alexander Bodon and Hein Salomonson.

Het hart van het voormalige Land van Hoboken in Rotterdam heet nu Museumpark. De eerste aanzet tot het ontstaan van dit culturele stadshart ligt in de jaren dertig van de 20ste eeuw. Daarbij was destijds geen sprake van doelbewust gemeentelijk beleid. Dat in de loop van de jaren dertig een cultureel centrum ontstond, is de uitkomst van een grillig zwaan-kleef-aan proces.

Hoofdstuk 2 van het boek 'Rotterdam en het bombardement: 75 jaar herinneren en vergeten' is geheel gewijd aan het monument 'De verwoeste stad' van Ossip Zadkine. Het monument werd al snel na de onthulling in 1953 immens populair, en die populariteit duurt nog altijd voort. Het huidige idee dat Rotterdammers de eerste jaren alleen maar negatief op ‘Zadkine’ reageerden klopt beslist niet. Al direct waren velen intens ontroerd door het monument, omdat het zo goed uitdrukking gaf aan wat zij in mei 1940 aan angst, wanhoop en verdriet hadden ervaren.