Island studies tends to focus on peripheral, isolated, and marginal aspects of island communities, while urban studies has showed scant awareness of islandness: Although many people research cities on islands, there is little tradition of researching island cities or urban archipelagos per se. Island cities (densely populated small islands and population centres of larger islands and archipelagos) nevertheless play import cultural, economic, political, and environmental roles on local, regional, and global scales. Many major cities and ports have developed on small islands, and even villages can fulfil important urban functions on lightly populated islands. Island concepts are also deployed to metaphorically describe developments in urban space. The journal Urban Island Studies explores island and urban processes around the world, taking an island approach to urban research and an urban approach to island research.
L'ombra de l'eunuc, by Jaume Cabré (1996), presents the inner conflict of a former terrorist during Franco's regime, and the consequences that the unsuccessful armed struggle has in his later life. The context surrounding the writing of the book is one of discredit to the concept of armed struggle as seen in democratic Spain and, in particular, in Catalonia. In contrast with that view, the author proposes a representation of the terrorist based on the individual, at a time when terrorism was a means to fight against a totalitarian governmentality, so that it consequently became partially legitimised. This recontextualization permits a re-evaluation of the violence taboo and the weakening of the Otherness barrier, thus disrupting the simplified and stereotyped perceptions of the menace and the threatened by using perspective and characterisation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.