Religious crossings and conversions on the Muslim–Christian frontier in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan

The renewed relevance of religion in post-Soviet public spheres has been accompanied by conspicuous and controversial conversion processes. This article compares cases of conversion on the Muslim-Christian frontier in Kyrgyzstan and in Georgia. It argues that the notions of boundary and frontier are essential to construct a more dynamic model for understanding 'spiritual' movement in social contexts that are rapidly changing. This approach in turn sheds light on the roles and the nature of social and cultural boundaries in the contemporary world

The modernist short story in Italy: the case of the 'Edizioni di Solaria'

This article investigates the role played by the modernist periodical Solaria (1926–34) as the Italian short story was being modernized. By offering a descriptive survey of the rarely studied corpus of fifteen short narrative volumes printed by the ‘Edizioni di Solaria’, the periodical’s minor publishing house, it sheds new light on the development of the short genre in this particular context. The two key questions addressed are, on the one hand, the validity of a recent hypothesis proposing Italo Svevo as a model for the ‘Solarian’ short story, and, on the other, the relationship between the codified novella/raccontoand other forms of short narrative prose derived from early twentieth-century avant-garde experimentation

Destination-Language Proficiency in Cross-National Perspective: A Study of Immigrant Groups in Nine Western Countries

Immigrants’ destination-language proficiency has been typically studied from a microperspective in a single country. In this article, the authors examine the role of macrofactors in a cross-national perspective. They argue that three groups of macrolevel factors are important: the country immigrants settle in (“destination” effect), the sending nation (“origin” effect), and the combination between origin and destination (“setting” or “community” effect). The authors propose a design that simultaneously observes multiple origin groups in multiple destinations. They present substantive hypotheses about language proficiency and use them to develop a series of macrolevel indicators. The authors collected and standardized 19 existing immigrant surveys for nine Western countries. Using multilevel techniques, their analyses show that origins, destinations, and settings play a significant role in immigrants’ language proficiency.

On the computation of stable sets for bimatrix games

In this paper it is shown how to compute stable sets, defined by Mertens (1989), inthe context of bimatrix games only using linear optimization techniques.combinatorics;