Culture
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‘I feel freedom when I am in my school’
In May 2022, Iryna Khamayko started an educational center for Ukrainian teenagers seeking refuge in Austria after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The idea was clear: to ensure a safe educational environment, equip the students with the German language, and make sure they could continue their education. Today, the Free People Educational Hub in Vienna is still open. Two of the school’s…
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Something happens, somewhere | Eurozine
A non-event, a continuity: growing rapeseed in Ukraine. For the most part, it’s an unsensational succession of seasonal repetitions: hybridized seeds are sown late summer into nitrogen-treated soil; phosphorus fertilizer is added in autumn to strengthen roots; the plants mature in spring, absorbing another dose of nitrogen; four-petalled yellow flowers, blooming late spring into summer, are sprayed with insecticide; once…
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The privilege of anxiety | Eurozine
Anna-Esther Younes is a Palestinian German scholar of race critical theories, psychoanalytic approaches, and de/post-/colonial theory. Her research on the ‘War on antisemitism’, race and settler-colonialism provides piercing insights into how the censorship and repression of Palestinians manifest today, in Germany, Europe and beyond. For more than a decade, Younes has experienced (research and academic) job losses and media misinformation…
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False prophets, false promises | Eurozine
‘And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.’ That’s the Book of Revelation, but the words might as well have been spoken by an American anytime between the religious revivals of the 18th century and the…
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The paunch | Eurozine
I am in possession of a protruding middle. If you don’t look carefully, you might miss it but it’s there: rotund, firmly planted and bulging. I carry it before me as if it were something to be proud of. On the occasions when it looks less prominent, it can be hidden under loose and preferably dark clothing, but if I…
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Raphael up against the wall
In his 1918 poem Radovat’sia rano (It’s Too Early to Rejoice), Vladimir Mayakovsky, the most celebrated poet of his generation in Russia, muses that if his Bolshevik comrades were to ‘find a white guardsman’, they would, without doubt, put him ‘up against the wall’. At the time of the Russian Civil War, an enemy of the new revolutionary government would,…
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Westsplaining versus eastsplaining | Eurozine
Westsplaining emerged in the 1990s but gained visibility when Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Political scientists Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz describe the phenomenon as an ‘unending stream of Western scholars and pundits’ that ‘condescend to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.’ And the gist of this ‘explanation’ is that ‘the situation’ came about…
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Emergency in Slovakia | Eurozine
‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded. F. Hayek The assassination attempt against Slovak prime minister Robert Fico on 15 May 2024 shocked Slovakia and attracted attention from around the world to this small central European country. Yet the population’s natural expression of grief and the prudent and calming words of the…
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Bracing for a populist surge
In all three Baltic states, the ubiquitous gloom stemming from Russia’s ongoing threat has firmed up the view of the European Union (EU) and NATO as guarantors of national security ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections in early June. The result? Fewer eurosceptics and what is expected to be a larger than usual turnout on 9 June. According to…
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Vertical occupation | Eurozine
Wars have many beginnings, but they refuse to end — history is merciless in giving this lesson to us again and again. Amid the ten-year Russian war in Ukraine, this thought is unbearable. Despite all odds, we need the idea of victory to hold us together in a shared effort of moving through the horrid reality of loss and devastation…
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