Culture
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Russia’s dreams of re-Union | Eurozine
For three decades after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, political science and practical politics in Western Europe and North America very rarely addressed Moscow’s efforts to ‘reintegrate’ the ‘post-Soviet space’ (i.e., the former republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics/USSR). Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, little attention was paid to the countless calls to restore the Soviet…
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The language that waited at the doorstep
Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories. Daniel Everett, How Languages Began Nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian, it is a poor language. There are only two great languages in the world – Russian and English. Aleksandr Lukashenka, President…
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Seeds of another world | Eurozine
Ever since Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, there has been frantic speculation about what it is the American Right really wants. The tendency is look to the leadership for clues. Who belongs to the inner circle, really? What do they believe in? Are they globalists, isolationists, neoliberals, fascists? What do these people mean when they talk…
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Writing is a job, not a mission
Every year in Poland we ritualistically lament the country’s low-level readership, but we are yet to see the state take any meaningful action. What are the consequences of this lack of regulation, when readership is clearly not important enough for the state to create circumstances that would help both publishing houses and female writers – often undervalued – to develop?…
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Complexity | Eurozine
In Wespennest, complexity scientist Stefan Thurner speaks to editor Andrea Zederbauer and literary scholar Thomas Eder about our evolving understanding of complex systems. A complex system consists of many elements that interact with and influence one another: ‘The essential thing in a complex system is that not every component interacts with every other component in exactly the same way, but…
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Profiting from destruction and reconstruction
Right now, the dominant narrative of those that occupy political and economic power-centres, and those whose careers and lives are wedded to militaries, is that a new world war is looming, and that we need to get ready. One person with such a narrative is the Swedish commander in chief, Micael Bydén, who stated that all Swedes must mentally prepare…
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Updating common knowledge | Eurozine
Have you ever wondered how the results of scientific research get written up, published, disseminated and, in some cases, eventually accepted as conventional wisdom? How do those obscure academic articles in hard-to-remember journals contribute to our everyday understanding of the world around us? Are you perplexed over how science says one thing today only to be upended tomorrow? If so,…
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Taming the ship of fools
Greta Thunberg accused participants of the 2023 World Economic Forum with ‘fuelling the destruction of the planet’. She argued that the irresponsibility of the economic elite, who ‘are prioritizing self-greed, corporate greed and short-term economic profits’, discredits their alleged competence. Thunberg, who called for the complete dismissal of their opinion, is also often dealt criticism: in 2020, for example, then…
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‘Science is cool’ | Eurozine
Due to differences in school systems between Ukraine and Austria, Ukrainian adolescents often enter university earlier than Austrian students. This episode of the Knowledgeable Youth podcast discusses the variations in higher education. The students’ conversation centres around Agata Zysiak’s article ‘Bleaching Blue Collars’ that draws insights from the experiences of first-generation students under state socialism in Poland and the barriers…
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Occupied futures | Eurozine
As the object of study rather than the subject of communication, the so-called Middle East has long been a locus for advanced technologies of mapping. In the field of aerial vision, these technologies historically employed cartographic and photographic methods. The legacy of cadastral, photographic and photogrammetric devices continues to impact how people and regions are quantified, nowhere more so than…
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