Higher Education

Higher Education in Times of Change

The overall common thread of this e-Book is education in general and higher education in particular. At a time of profound changes in the educational arena and across society at large, thinking higher education and its dynamics is paramount. This e-Book gathers five selected articles published by the authors between 2018 and 2020 that tackle, analyse and discuss some very current topics, such as the transversal competences higher education institutions need to provide their students with, considering their relevance to preparing the future professionals; the importance of Sociology of Education in promoting sustainability literacy in higher education; the COVID-19 pandemic and how it is reshaping the educational arena and the learning and teaching process; and the funding of the scientific publication in Open Access, an increasingly central outlet for the dissemination of the scientific production. The authors hope to offer the educational field some insights, hindrances but also possibilities that lie ahead of the higher education dynamics, actors, policies and forces.

Linguistics, Literary Studies and Communication: A Digital Perspective: A Festschrift for

Literature serves many functions in the society. As a mirror of the society, it gives an image of that society, which may be true or distorted, either in reality or perceived as distorted by the society as a whole. As a lamp, literature helps us to imagine alternative realities or new pathways in which we may walk. George Orwell’s 1984, a prognostication of governments’ intrusion into citizen’s privacy has become a reality in our day: with the emergence of the “Internet of Things”, Orwell’s Big Brother is now truly watching us. Against the backdrop of literary imagination becoming scientific reality, this paper investigates how nanotechnology has been and is being imagined in literature. 120 works of fiction in different media: movies and movie series, novel, comics/other media, cartoon, computer games, short story, are analysed to provide answers to the following questions: is nanotechnology imagined as a force for good or evil? How legitimate are these “prognostications” in the light of current realities? Literary conceptualizations of nanotechnology are ambivalent at best, and horrifying at the worst. This leads us to conclude that the prospects of nanotechnology give us a cause to pause.

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