Search results for ""ibidem-verlag""

The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022. It began eight years earlier in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. In his new book, Jakob Hauter investigates the escalation of violence in the spring and summer of 2014. He demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the pre-2022 conflict was not a civil war. Ukraine has been fighting a Russian invasion since the armed conflict's very beginning. Hauter arrives at this conclusion based on a thorough review of the digital open source information (DOSI) available on the Internet. He argues that social science research needs theoretical and methodological innovation to operate in the abundant but murky information environment surrounding the Donbas War and other conflicts of the social media age. To address this challenge, he develops an escalation sequence model which divides the formative phase of the Donbas War into six critical junctures. He then combines the social science methodology of process tracing with DOSI analysis to investigate the causes of these critical junctures. For each juncture, Hauter assesses the available evidence of domestic causes and Russian interference, reaching the conclusion that, in most cases, there is convincing evidence that Russian involvement was the primary cause of armed escalation.

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After their Shreds of War: Fates from the Donbas Frontline 2015–2019, Eperjesi and Kachura uncover in this second volume effects of the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia. Oleksandr managed to visit the peninsula not long after its occupation by Russian troops. While doing interviews with local people, he was threatened by the authorities yet managed to escape with his exclusive stories of teachers and students, pensioners, children and their parents, market vendors and businessmen, homeless people, health care employees and their patients, the so called "cotton wool people," and Ukrainian patriots. Many of them told him about how hopeful they were in early 2014, and how disappointed they have become as their expectations were not met by the "Russian world." This concerns the banking system of Crimea, propaganda and censorship of the Russian state, and failed tourist seasons.People still living or somehow related to Crimea tell us about the dramatic days of the illegal annexation. They explain what led to the tragedy and what mistakes were made by the Ukrainian authorities. Ordinary people, soldiers, journalists, heroes and traitors, emigrants, Crimean Tatars, Russian soldiers, Cossacks and the members of the so called "Crimean Self-Defense" disclose how they contributed to the historic events on the peninsula. Finally, the famous Crimean film director Oleh Sentsov shares with us how he managed to survive his illegal imprisonment by Russia and what impact it has had on his life.

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This edited volume critically assesses different aspects of five literary genres novels, poetry, short-stories, drama, and non-fictional prose contributed to by the Indian diasporic writers settled principally in North America and Europe. Films made by or on members of the Indian diaspora have been also checked out. The predominant approach in the anthology is not only a feminist one, although special emphasis is given on assessing the writings by females. The emphasis of the anthology is on: (a) critical analyses of themes, styles, diction, and relevance of the writings; (b) assessment of the research potentialities of these writings; (c) examining how literary theories could be used for explaining and assessing the writings; (d) proper contextualization of the writings; and (e) finding out the historical roots and suggesting the future prospects of such writings. The essays included in the book re-read Indian diasporic writings for their appreciable points as well as those which need development. The collection fills in lacuna of critical approaches to Indian diasporic writings presently available in the market. In fact, there is scarcely any book presently available that covers critical approaches to all the five literary genres of Indian diasporic writings.

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This book engages critically with some of the major assumptions of prominent Transhumanists such as Nick Bostrom of Oxford University and Stefan Sorgner of John Cabot University at Rome. More broadly, questions concerning the complex relationships between society, technology, and ethics are widely explored. Major thinkers such as St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and C. S. Lewis are enlisted to highlight and support the major arguments presented by the author. The book aims at a general readership interested in the current claims and possible outcomes of the Transhumanist and Posthumanist movement. It strikes a cautionary note about humanity's reliance on emerging technologies, particularly their potential to enhance and, eventually transform, human life span, cognition, and emotion.

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The war separated families, took lives, broke fates ... It is very important to know and remember it at any time. Even many decades later, new details, memories, and testimonies appear. This book gathers several fascinating, true family stories written from accounts of parents, grandparents, etc. The authors, whose articles were collected with the help of the popular scientific publication Historical Truth, tell us about the worst war of the 20th century, about the fate of those people whose lives were divided forever into "before" and "after." Here we can find first-hand accounts about Ukrainians who fought in various armies, about the lives of deported people, about the fate of people taken to compulsory labour camps, and about the men and women who remain in our memories forever.

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Every major socio-political change starts with some discarding. Suffice it to think about the heaps of rubbish consisting of old furniture, cars, busts of famous communist leaders, badges, and books on the streets of Eastern Europe in the fall/winter of 1989/1990. Among the institutions which have the greatest amount of experience with discarding are libraries: Counterintuitive as it may seem, libraries (but also museums and archives) regularly discard books as part of their job. In the wake of the collapse of communism in Europe, stock revision was needed in libraries, but did it unfold in a business as usual fashion or was it a bibliocide (as it was labelled by some media in Croatia) or even the biggest destruction of books in the post-war period (as it was characterized by a German journalist)? When does a standard library practice start attracting public attention? What happened in Croatia that there is even a Wikipedia page about bookicide in the 1990s? This book approaches the issue on at least three levels (phenomenological, discursive, and theoretical) and from three angles (from the point of view of librarians, non-professionals, and, metaphorically, discarded books themselves). The aim is to offer an innovative and original interpretation of post-socialist transition and post-Yugoslav memory while at the same time providing an empirically founded case study of the inconsistencies and lack of implementation of regulations in the field of librarianship in Croatia as opposed to a seemingly more synchronized environment in Slovenia.

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Anastasia Lysyvets's memoir Tell us about a happy life... (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia...), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets's testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In his commentary, Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets's text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.

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Since the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis, ourlives have completely changed: Shutdowns, working in home offices, contact restrictions, daily bulletins from virologists, protest movements, and conspiracy fantasies seem to have become part of our new everyday life. Could we have been prepared for this? Totally. It's all been there before: in the movies. Science fiction films and series have always dealt with the future and its possible course, social changes, and conflicts in a speculative way. Denis Newiak searches through the scenes of pandemic movies and series to bring out ideas for how to cope with the social, political, and economic challenges of the crisis. Can the scenarios developed in film help us to pass this test-and to emerge from it with greater strength?

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The scope of multilingualism and multiculturalism within societies is increasing on a global scale. As this is happening, discussions are emerging concerning the significance of including a variety of perspectives in classroom discourse as well as the imperative of ridding it of a prevailing monocultural straitjacket. Against the backdrop of these changing realities, authors have advocated for a revision and adaptation of current teaching methodology and classroom materials in order to do greater justice to an increasingly diverse student population. This book presents the findings from a qualitative research project conducted in Australia, a country acclaimed for its linguistic and cultural diversity. Specifically, the study investigated the educational context of Indigenous Australian learners by shedding light on the incorporation of First Nations perspectives in teaching materials and methodology. Additionally, the project identified therewith-related challenges and possibilities for improvement. The results provide insights into the multifacetedness of language- as well as culture-related factors, which prove vital for learning processes. Moreover, the results reveal the complexities arising in connection with the incorporation of First Nations perspectives in classroom discourse. The data also point towards dimensions for improvement and recommendations for action for educators working in diverse classroom settings. As growing linguistic and cultural diversity has become a global reality, this volume, addressing Australian First Nations perspectives, offers an important contribution to the field of contemporary education.

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This is the smoking gun of all your research. -- Professor Richard E Holmes (18 February 2001). Birds of Prey is a microhistory of the Nazi occupation of Białowieźa Forest, Polands national park. The narrative stretches from Görings palatial lifestyle to the common soldier on the ground killing Jews, partisans, and civilians. Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitlers Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography, Colonialism and Nazi Lebensraum, the Holocaust, and the war in the East. By weaving together a narrative about Hermann Göring, his inner circle, and ordinary soldiers, the book reveals the Nazi ambition to draw together East Prussia, the Bialystok region, and Ukraine into a common eastern frontier of the Greater German state, revealing how the Luftwaffe, the German hunt, and the state forestry were institutional perpetrators of Lebensraum and genocide. Up until now the Luftwaffe had not been identified in specific acts of genocide or placed at large scale killings of Jews, civilians, and partisans. This gap in the historical record had been facilitated by the destruction of the Luftwaffes records in 1945. Through a forensic and painstaking process of piecing together scraps of evidence over two decades, and utilizing Geographical Information System software, Philip W. Blood managed to decipher previously obscure reports and expose patterns of Nazi atrocities.

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African cultural productions of humour have increased even in the face of myriad economic foibles and social upheavals. For instance, from the 1990s, stand-up comedy emerged across the continent and has maintained a pervasive presence since then. Its specificities are related to contemporary economic and political contexts and are also drawn from its pre-colonial history, that of joking forms and relationships, and orality. Izuu Nwankwá's fascinating collected volume offers a transnational appraisal of this unique art form spanning different nations of the continent and its diasporas. The book engages variously with jokesters, their materials, the mediums of dissemination, and the cultural value(s) and relevance of their stage work, encompassing the form and content of the practice. Its ruling theoretical perspective comes from theatre and performance, cultural studies, linguistics, and literary studies.

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In her Four Essays on World War II, Olena Stiazhkina inscribes the Ukrainian history of World War II into a wider European and world context. Among other aspects, she analyses the mobilization measures on the eve of the war, and reconsiders Soviet narratives on them. Scrutinizing social and political processes initiated by the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, she outlines how mobilization and militarization became integral parts of Soviet politics. Today, the Kremlin uses Soviet and post-Soviet Russian narratives of World War II to justify its aggressive policies towards a number of democratic countries. Russia is engaged in falsification of the past to underpin claims of a so-called Russian World and its ongoing war against Ukraine. Against this background, Stiazhkina offers a new understanding of what happened in Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

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The book explores transformations of the apocalyptic figure of the Antichrist in various post-Soviet discourses, including ecclesiastical and political writings, conspiracy theories, and literary texts. Drawing on the extensive research into diverse materials published in the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it demonstrates how an initially religious idea has penetrated secular discourses and what implications this entails. By applying the innovative analytical category of ideomyth, the book successfully answers the question of how and why the figure of the Antichrist is employed within the Russian post-Soviet semiosphere, with a special focus on texts that emerged within nationalist and religious milieus.

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Li-Chun Hsiao attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, several key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what he conceives as the primal scene of postcoloniality -- the Haitian Revolution. He unpacks and critiques the post-structuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Edouard Glissants, C. L. R. Jamess, and Derek Walcotts representations of Toussaint LOuverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and post-coloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal and the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. Hsiao argues that postcolonial intellectuals characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesnt really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustains the living on of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while invoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

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Numerous political commentators have noted the rise of the radical right worldwide. How has the radical right responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? Has the radical right been legitimized in a world of closed borders and greater securitization? Have radical right regimes in power cracked under the strains of the crisis and thus undermined their own political fortunes? Have radical right-wing responses to COVID-19 been uniform or diversified? These are some of the questions tackled in Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by the Radical Right. This volume gathers a collection of short pieces, which highlight the multi-faceted ways in which right-wing and radical right-wing political forces have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents research by scholars from all around the world concentrating on the evolution of radical right-wing movements since the COVID-19 crisis began and their influence on mainstream and alternative narratives. The edited volume includes case studies as well as far-reaching reports on the radical rights utilizing of the crisis to re-shape ideas about sovereignty, globalization, democracy, equality, diversity, and political legitimacy. Such studies comprise cases on gender and class, racism, religious hatred, scapegoating, anti-Semitism and Sinophobia, conspiracy theories, and online radicalization, focusing on locations as diverse as the US, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, France, Spain, Ukraine, Latvia, Israel, and India. All such studies are compiled in a total of six chapters and an epilogue, organized thematically and by country.

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From its roots in revolution and war, Ukraine's Azov movement has grown from a militia of fringe far-right figures and football hooligans fending off Russian-backed forces into a multipronged social movement that has become the envy of the global far right. In this first English-language book on the Azov movement, Michael Colborne explains how Azov came to be and continues to exploit Ukraine's fractured social and political situation -- including the only ongoing war on European soil -- to build one of the most ambitious and dangerous far-right movements in the world.

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In this study of three of Barbara Pyms novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of womens humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of womens humour enables Pyms female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.

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Inez De Florio, born blind, tells us the moving, fascinating, and true story of her recovery from blindness at the age of 48 and how she coped with learning to see. Eyesight seems to be completely effortless for us, but for persons blind since birth these processes of adaptation are overwhelmingly demanding. For that reason, more than half of the patients commit suicide within the first years after successful surgery. De Florio, whose late recovery from blindness did not stop her from making a brilliant academic career as a professor in didactics, foreign languages, and intercultural communication, not only reveals astounding insights into the world of the visually impaired and their interactions with sighted people. Based on newest scientific findings, she also offers an illuminating report on how to learn to see and how to appreciate visual perception without over-emphasizing the importance of eyesight.

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In Statu Nascendi is a peer-reviewed journal that aspires to be a world-class scholarly platform encompassing original academic research dedicated to the circle of Political Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Theory of International Relations, Foreign Policy, and the political Decision-making process. The journal investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the stage-of-becoming plays a vital role. Issue 2020:2 comprises, amongst others, the following interviews & articles: Clarity is what I seek first: An interview with Professor Tamara Albertini by Piotr Pietrzak, Andrea Giuseppe Ragno: Reinventing Politics: An Epistemic Conversion of Information Technologies, Koumparoudis Evangelos: Information Society and a New Form of Embodiment. Iga Kleszczyńska: The Analysis of the Economic and Political Determinants of the Venezuelan Presidential Crisis since 2019; Attila Mezei: Balance of Power and the 21st Century Iron Law of International Relations or an Outdated Idea; Bálint László Tóth: North-South Railway Construction Projects in the Visegrád Four Countries (V4). Spillovers of Central East European Intergovernmental Transport Development Initiatives.

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Charles Marowitz was the first American to direct at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the first American to direct at the Czech National Theatre (while collaborating with Vaclav Havel). Known as a maverick playwright, director, and critic, he nurtured numerous figures who have come to shape contemporary theatre and larger society. Without Marowitz the theories and ideas of Antonin Artaud would remain obscure. The entire trajectory and ecology of theatre and performance since the 1960s have been considerably influenced by this alone. The present-day popularity of immersive theatre was a mode of performance introduced to the British theatre by Charles Marowitz and Allan Kaprow in the famous Happening at the 1963 Edinburgh Drama Conference. In 1968 Marowitz started the Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in collaboration with Thelma Holt. There is a gap in our collective understanding of this important figure and a gap in currently available literature about him. The Marowitz Compendium seeks to spark a revaluation. The audience for this book includes students, postgraduates, specialists and general readers interested in drama and the history of contemporary theatre.

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A famous Soviet general who fought in the Battle of Moscow (1941/1942) and the siege of Leningrad (19411944), Andrey Vlasov (19011946) was captured by Nazi troops and then defected to the Third Reich. Supported by Nazi propaganda, he created a Russian Liberation Committee that later became the Russian Liberation Army (RLA). The RLA was a body of several hundred officers and several thousand troops who had defected from the USSR and served Nazi purposes on Soviet territory. Vlasov was arrested by Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia while trying to escape to theWestern Front and was subsequently tried for treason and executed by Soviet authorities. In 2015, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) released three volumes of archives documenting the infamous Vlasov Case, the main instance of Soviet collaborationism with Nazi Germany. With this volume, which draws on the archives of Russia, Belarus, Germany, and the US, the English-speaking audience can now access the most important documents on this topic for the first time. The documents tell the story of Vlasovs betrayal, from the moment he became a prisoner, to his service under the Nazis, and up through the trial in Moscow in 1946. Volume 1 is comprised of archival documents on Vlasovs activities from 1942 to 1945. Volume 2 explores the Soviet investigations of Vlasov during the 19451946 trial.

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This monograph examines Caryl Phillipss The Nature of Blood (1997),a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of characters revealing different facets of the Jewish question. Maria Festa also provides a historical excursus on the notion of race and considers another character alluding to Shakespeares Othello to expose the paradoxes of the relationship between subjugator and subjugated. The study makes the case that among the novels most remarkable achievements is Phillipss effort to redress the absence of the Other from our history, that by depicting experiences of displacement, and by confronting readers with seemingly disconnected narrative fragments, The Nature ofBloodis a reminder of the missing stories, the voicesmarginalised and often racializedthat Western history has consistently failed to include in its accounts of the past and arguably its present.

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This book is dedicated to one of the topical issues of the history and philosophy of medicinethe analysis of the research method of Galen of Pergamon, an outstanding physician of Antiquity (2nd century AD). Galen's works, on the one hand, were the outcome of the Hippocratic tradition and its development in medicine for more than 500 years and, on the other hand, have determined the further development of medical theory and practice up to the Scientific Revolution in the 17th19th centuries. Dmitry A. Balalykin argues that Galen used the apodictic method in the analysis of the phenomena of medical theory and practice. The application of the concept of apodictics in relation to the events in the history of medicine is still debatable, although there is no doubt about the use of this term towards, for example, the history of mathematics. The author analyzes a significant amount of sources, researching the development of the apodictic method in medicine before Galen and pointing to those key innovations that were applied by him. The synthesis of the philosophical theory of clinical practice in the works of the great physician of Antiquity is the prime focus of this book. It is intended for scholars who deal with various issues of the history and philosophy of the natural sciences, primarily medicine, and also a wide readership interested in the history of Antiquity and the history of science.

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The recent history of post-Soviet societies is often described in terms of the transition metaphor. Images of movement as well as changing places and situations were foundational for the social conceptualization of the new nations. The idea of looking for novelty and new beginnings legitimized the dissolution of the USSR as well as many state- and economy-related experiments. This volume describes how the new societies survived this period of regime change, economic crises, internal wars, political drawbacks, and social innovations, and how they are making sense of it. The volumes contributors include Russian, Ukrainian, and German scholars who analyze political, social, and cultural ideologies: Natalia Koulinka, Kostiantyn Fedorenko, Pavel Skigin, Jesko Schmoller, Valentyna Kyselova, Anton Avksentiev, Chris Monday, Egor Isaev, Oleksandr Zabirko, Sergiy Kurbatov, Alla Marchenko, Jennifer J. Carroll, Daria Goriacheva, and Darya Malyutina.

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Ambiguity Revisited is concerned with the manner in which pictures communicate with the spectator. Its focus lies in those fluid, indeterminate spaces where our reading of images, in art and photography, exercises and draws upon our imagination, memory, and experience. Sir William Empsons seminal (1930) text: Seven Types of Ambiguity is used as a springboard to discussion, towards a fresh way of exploring ambiguity beyond English literature, and in a broader framework to that contained in John Bergers (1989) Another Way of Telling. The use of ambiguity in art and photography, as in literature, is both a conscious and an unconscious act; and ambiguity influences the way in which we respond to work, from Leonardo da Vincis portraits to the photographer William Egglestons engaging and idiosyncratic reflections on Americas Deep South. This ambiguity is a force for good, or at least one to be reckoned with, due to its participatory nature in actively engaging with, or masking itself from, the viewer. Ambiguity is infrequently discussed but is highly relevant as an expressive device. It holds a position at the core of communication within the visual arts. As society becomes influenced increasingly by communications delivered in a visual form, so we, the consumers, require tools, more than ever, to engage with the work.

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High Treason and Low Comedy is the first in-depth treatment in English of E. E. Kischs work as a playwright, a phase of his life to which he devoted considerable effort during the years 19201925.The translations of his two most successful works for the cabaret stages of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia form the basis of discussions that fit them into several intersecting streams: biographical, historical, and cultural. The plays are Die Hetzjagd, which describes the last day on earth of the infamous traitor, Colonel Alfred Redl, and Die Himmelfahrt der Tonka ibenice (Galgentoni), which presents the comical, coarse, and, at times, pathetic efforts of a Prague prostitute to argue her way into heaven. The plays are a portal into the world of Kischs youth as an enterprising journalist and into his thinking and writing just before he became the raging reporter and the star of international reportage. While they reflect the Prague milieu of his youth during the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they also illustrate Kischs lifelong critical attitude toward the conservative authorities of society, their derelictions of duty, and their indifference to the welfare of the common man and woman. The book also examines the long afterlife of both of these stories as they were re-created by artists in stage, film, novelistic, and television adaptations, illustrating the theme of what happens when historical materials are transformed into art.

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Remembering Diversity in East-Central European Cityscapes. Based on up-to-date field material, this issue focuses on the palimpsest-like environments of East-Central European borderland cities. The present shapes and contents of these urban environments derive from combinations of cultural continuities and political ruptures, present-day heritage industries and collective memories about the contentious past, expressive material forms and less conspicuous meaning-making activities of human actors; they evolve from perpetual tensions between the choices of the present and the weight of the past. The contributors address a set of key questions: What is specific about the transnationalisation of memory in these urban public spaces? What are the political rationales and ramifications of the different approaches taken to the legacies of perished population groups in different cities? How do these approaches relate to European dimensions of memory and the "European vector" of identity-making of the contemporary urban populations?

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In his timely book, Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russias policies. Specifically, he analyzes such concepts as Eurasianism, Holy Russia, Russian civilization, Russia as a continent, Novorossia, and others. He demonstrates that these concepts reached unprecedented ascendance in the Russian public debates, tending to overshadow other political and domestic discussions. Suslov argues that the geopolitical imagination, structured by these concepts, defines the identity of post-Soviet Russia, while this complex of geopolitical representations engages, at the same time, with the broader, international criticism of the Western liberal world order and aligns itself with the conservative defense of cultural authenticity across the globe. Geopolitical ideologies and utopias discussed in the book give the post-Soviet political mainstream the intellectual instruments to think about Russias exclusion -- imaginary or otherwise -- from the processes of a global world which is re-shaping itself after the end of the Cold War; they provide tools to construct the self-perception of Russia as a sovereign great-power, a self-sufficient civilisation, and as one of the poles in a multipolar world; and they help to establish the Messianic vision of Russia as the beacon of order, tradition, and morality in a sea of chaos and corruption.

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The new biannual, peer-reviewed Journal of Romanian Studies, jointly developed by The Society for Romanian Studies and ibidem Press, examines critical issues in Romanian studies, linking work in that field to wider theoretical debates and issues of current relevance, and serving as a forum for junior and senior scholars. The journal also presents articles that connect Romania and Moldova comparatively with other states and their ethnic majorities and minorities, and with other groups by investigating the challenges of migration and globalization and the impact of the European Union. Issue No. 2 contains: Lucian Leuştean: Romania, the Paris Peace Conference and the Protection System of Race, Language and Religion Minorities: A Reassessment. Gavin Bowd: Between France and Romania, Between Science and Propaganda. Emmanuel de Martonne in 1919. Doina Anca Cretu: Humanitarian Aid in the Bulwark of Bolshevism: The American Relief Administration and the Quest for Sovereignty in Post-World War I Romania. Gábor Egry: Made in Paris? Contested Regions and Political Regionalism during and after Peacemaking: Székelyföld and the Banat in a Comparative Perspective. Svetlana Suveica: Against the Imposition of the Foreign Yoke: The Bessarabians Write to Wilson (1919). Florian Kührer-Wielach: A fertile and flourishing garden: Alexandru Vaida-Voevod's Political Account Ten Years after Versailles.

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The second part of this multi-volume project assembles a series of recollections and debates on the Ukrainian revolutions of 1990, 2004, and 20132014. After an introduction to the methodology of oral history, it presents twenty interviews with participants and eyewitnesses of the events in Ukraine, and documents a series of workshop discussions conducted at a symposium held in 2017. In these workshops, activists and observers of each of the three revolutions exchanged and compared their memories, analyses, and evaluations. This volume thus not only provides a comprehensive collection of firsthand accounts of the three historic Ukrainian upheavals, but also reveals the interrelations between them. The volume documents assessments from Barbara Krauz-Mozer, Markiyan Ivashchyshyn, Natalia Klymovska, Vakhtang Kipiani, Mykola Kniazhycki, Natalyia Zubar, Yulia Tymoshenko, Aleksander Kwaniewski, Viktor Taran, Markiyan Matsekh, Yulia Tychkivska, Leonid Findberg, Yulia Mostova, Oksana Zabuzhko, Eduard Drach, Michailo Cherenkoff, Andriy Dudchenko, Oleg Mahdych, Rebecca Harms, Herman van Rumpoy, and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski.

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In Statu Nascendi is a new peer-reviewed journal that investigates specific issues through a socio-cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approach to raise a new type of civic awareness about the complexity of the contemporary crisis, instability, and warfare situations, where the stage of becoming plays a vital role. Issue 2019:1 comprises, amongst others, the following articles: - An Interview with Marcin Grabowski on the Political Situation in Asia in General and North Korea in Particular. The EU and the Migration Crisis: The EU-Turkey Deal: Policy Effectiveness and Challenges of Implementation. The Syrian Conflict (20112017): How a Perfectly Winnable Uprising has been Transformed into a Civil War, Only to End up as a Ferocious Proxy War. Interview with Prof. Maria Dimitrova on Continental Philosophy in General and Emmanuel Levinas Philosophy in Particular. Patristic Tradition, Criterialism, and Levinasian Quasi-Theological Conditions of the Self. Reconsidering the Notion of the Creative Genius in Postmodern Philosophy and Art.

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Despite important strides in the fight against poverty in the past two decades, child poverty remains widespread and persistent, particularly in Africa. Poverty in all its dimensions is detrimental for early childhood development and often results in unreversed damage to the lives of girls and boys, locking children and families into intergenerational poverty. This edited volume contributes to the policy initiatives aiming to reduce child poverty and academic understanding of child poverty and its solutions by bringing together applied research from across the continent. With the Sustainable Development Goals having opened up an important space for the fight against child poverty, not least by broadening its conceptualization to be multidimensional, this collection aims to push the frontiers by challenging existing narratives and exploring alternative understandings of the complexities and dynamics underpinning child poverty. Furthermore, it examines policy options that work to address this critical challenge.

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This is the first issue of the biannual, peer-reviewed Journal of Romanian Studies, jointly developed by The Society for Romanian Studies and ibidem Press. The new interdisciplinary journal examines critical issues in Romanian Studies, linking work in that field to wider theoretical debates and issues of current relevance, and serving as a forum for junior and senior scholars. The journal also presents articles that connect Romania and Moldova comparatively with other states and their ethnic majorities and minorities, and with other groups by investigating the challenges of migration and globalization and the impact of the European Union. Volume 1,1 (2019) Katherine Verdery: Thoughts on a Century of Surveillance Vintila Mihailescu: From Peasant to Post-Peasant Society. The Rural Footprint of Nation-Building Dennis Deletant: Shattered Illusions: Britain and Iuliu Maniu, 1942-1945 Maria Bucur: Queen Marie and Interwar Feminism Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu: Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism in Romania: The Case of Alexandru Jar Revisited

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The region that once comprised the Soviet Union has been the scene of crises with serious implications for international law. Some of these, like the separatist conflict in Chechnya, date to the time of the dissolution of the USSR. Others, like Russias forcible annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraines Donbas, erupted years later. The seizure of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which took place long before, would trouble Soviet-western relations for the Cold Wars duration and gained new relevance when the Baltic States re-emerged in the 1990s. The fate of Ukraine notwithstanding, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 complicates future efforts at nuclear non-proliferation. Legal proceedings in connection with events in the post-Soviet space brought before the International Court of Justice and under investment treaties or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea may be steps toward the resolution of recent crises -- or tests of the resiliency of modern international law.

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The Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia share similar experiences in the past, and a swift post-communist integration into the originally West European communities of democratic countries, as their return to Europe. Michal Vít explores how these three countries have been influenced by the new all-European environment for their independent national development. He introduces a research framework for the analysis of national identity focusing on parliamentary political parties represented at both the national and European levels. How did these parties cope with possible misfits of their understanding of national identity? How did these tensions interplay with their new transnational European political environment? Víts study finds that, after the accession of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia to the EU, there started a gradual decrease of identification of political parties with the European space. The extent of this estrangement was determined by these parties belonging or non-belonging to European political party families. The book provides a better understanding of current political developments in East-Central Europe and their consequences for these countries national and European politics.

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This book is a must-read for anyone interested in transforming the impersonal character of the medical experience into a personalised, relational, spiritual, and holistic dialog about human health. It promotes a holistic vision of the doctor-patient relationship, a medicine that ought to be based on the totality of the human experience rather than on the reductive view of the patient as a person with a certain disease. Ken A. Bryson describes the character of medicine as the gateway to holistic healing and argues that we need to secure the ethical foundation of universal medicine as not relative to a cultural setting, thus establishing the Oath of Hippocrates as the universal proof of human dignity. This view emboldens us to raise medicine from the level of an impersonal technological encounter with disease to its rightful place as a sacred activity that includes all the levels of the human experience. The book offers practical suggestions on how to accomplish that objective.

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What is a cultural error? What causes it? What are the consequences of such an error? This volume enables the reader to identify cultural errors and to understand how they are produced. Sometimes they come about because of the gap between the source culture and the target culture, on other occasions they are the result of the cultural inadequacies of the translator, or perhaps the ambiguity arises because of errors in the reception of the translated text. The meta-translational problem of the cultural error is explored in great detail in this book. The authors address the fundamental theoretical issues that underpin the term. The essays examine a variety of topics ranging from the deliberate political manipulation of cultural sources in Russia to the colonial translations at the heart of Edward FitzGeralds famous translation The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Adopting a resolutely transdisciplinary approach, the seventeen contributors to this volume come from a variety of academic backgrounds in music, art, literature, and linguistics. They provide an innovative reading of a key term in translation studies today.

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Russia has changed dramatically since the beginning of this decade. This volume presents a unique collection of articles by Russian scholars and experts, originally published in Russian in the journal Kontrapunkt (Counterpoint). The authors include Yulia Bederova, Andrey Desnitsky, Maria Eismont, Aleksandr Gorbachev, Tatiana Nefedova, Ella Paneyakh, Sergey Parkhomenko, Nikolay Petrov, Kirill Rogov, Sergey Sergeev, Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, Andrey Soldatov, Svetlana Solodovnik, Anna Tolstova, Aleksandr Verkhovsky, and Natalia Zubarevich. Their essays cover a broad range of subjects from the Russian political scene and state-society relations to the politics of culture and the realm of ideas and symbols. These contributions offer fascinating insights into Russias multifaceted and complex development after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

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Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Becketts creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices -- eyes, mirrors, windows -- point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres -- manifestations without origin -- reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Becketts use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Becketts creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan -- in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts -- offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

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In 1984 Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay 'The Tragedy of Central Europe' in The New York Review of Books, which established the framework for disputes about the space between East and West for the following 30 years. Even today, the echo of those debates is still audible in spatial narratives. Discussing the way in which literary figures are positioned within new hierarchies such as gender, class, or ethnicity, this volume shows how the space of the imagined Central Europe has been de- and reconstructed. Special attention is paid to the role of the past in shaping contemporary spatial discourse.

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Featuring a special section on Identity Clashes: Russian and Ukrainian Debates on Culture, History, and Politics. This issue's special section explores the discursive gaps, tensions, and ruptures between Ukrainian and Russian narratives of national identity. It gives the floor to Russian and Ukrainian authors with a view to enabling analytical comparisons between the dominant narratives in the two countries, including their cultural, historical, and political dimensions. This juxtaposition of Russian and Ukrainian insights is aimed at deepening our understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

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How far have universities in post-Communist states adopted the practices and habits of their branded and consumer-oriented equivalents in the English-speaking world? While not assuming that university education in those states reflects in any mechanistic way the regulated, business-led system long established in places like the US, and now being dramatically realized in countries like Britain, this edited collection identifies some marked shifts in the direction of what might best be described as neoliberalisation, examining its particularities in local situations where establishment ideologies were, until the early 1990s, deeply alien to all kinds of commercially driven entities. Many of the authors are concerned not only with the linked issues of commercialism, instrumentalism, bureaucracy, and managerialism, framed locally and nationally, but also with the meaning and purpose of universities outside or against their status as efficient gatherers of income. The collection makes specific reference to Lithuania, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia, and comprises theoretical as well as empirical studies of diverse but connected subjects, including the marketization of the academy, regional reactions to globalization as expressed in the representational rhetoric of specific curricula, the role and place of civic education, comparisons between educational settings, pedagogies for a critical and ethical consciousness, corporate and state demands and their effects on academic freedom, and the positive potential of new communication technologies. In all these cases, the system of neoliberalism, or rather an uneven process of neoliberalisation, forms a backdrop to the particular issues discussed.

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"Brussels made democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and good governance its top co-operation priorities in the EU Strategy Framework towards Central Asia for 20072013. This book examines two interrelated questions: To what extent has EU democracy promotion in Central Asia been successful? And, to the extent that it was successful, why was it so? The book presents a comprehensive analytical framework for the evaluation of democracy promotion, including factors which may facilitate or hinder democratic development in Central Asia. It demonstrates the validity of a holistic approach to analyzing impediments of democracy promotion meaning that external pro-democratic support is affected by a variety of diverse factors whose impact can vary as international, regional, and domestic conditions change. The stable and rich authoritarian state of Kazakhstan is different from the much poorer Kyrgyzstana state prone to political instability, but also to democratic openings. By contrasting the success of democracy promotion in these two countries which have different strategic importance for the EU, this study provides valuable insights into how non-normative interests interfere with normatively driven policies."

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Ukraine drew significant media attention after the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent undeclared war waged by Russia. However, the nature of these events and their impact on the social, economic, and political development of this country remain under-studied and, hence, often misunderstood. The reader is invited to take an inside look at the recent developments in Ukraine and to search for an answer to the question of whether transition from externally to internally driven development is possible in this case. Anton Oleinik argues that Ukraine is currently going through a revolutionary period aimed at building a nation-state and its aftermath. Ukraine is a latecomer in this process, especially compared with most other European countries. Its outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty. It is yet to be seen if a current surge in volunteerism and bottom-up civic initiatives will lead to the emergence of a viable and sustainable national democratic system in this country.

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Medical doctors driving taxis, architects selling beer on street corners, scientific institutes closed down amid rusting carcasses of industrial plantsthese images became common at the turn of the 21st century in many once modern civilized countries. In quite a few of them, long-time neighbours came to kill each other, apparently motivated by the newly discovered differences of religion, language, or origin. Civil nationalism gave way to tribal, ethnic, and confessional conflict. Rational arguments of geopolitical nature have been replaced by claims of self-righteousness and moral superiority. These snapshots are not random. They are manifestations of a phenomenon called demodernization that can be observed from the banks of the Neva to the banks of the Euphrates, from the deserts of Central Asia to the English countryside and all the way to the city of Detroit. Demodernization is a growing trend today, but it also has a history. Seventeen scholars, including historians, philosophers, sociologists, and archaeologists, offer their well substantiated views of demodernization. The book is divided into three parts dedicated to conceptual debates as well as historical and contemporary cases. It book provides a wealth of empirical materials and conceptual insights that provide a multi-faceted approach to demodernization.

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Although the song is often the subject of monographs, one of its forms remains insufficiently researched: the vocalised song, communicated to the spectator through performance. The study of the song takes one back to the study of vocal practices, from aesthetic objects to forms and to plural styles. To conceive a song means approaching it in its different instances of creation as well as its linguistic diversity. Jean Nicolas De Surmont proposes ways of research and analysis useful to musicians, musicologists, and literary critics alike. In his book he takes up the issue of vocal poetry in addition to examining the theoretic aspects of song objects. Rather than offering an autonomous model of analysis, De Surmont extends the research fields and suggests responses to debates that have involved everyone interested in vocal poetic forms.

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Combining phenomenological analysis and affect theory, this book takes stock of the various ways in which the body in Samuel Becketts drama participates in the affective ecology of performance. If the post-human innovation up until the present has worked to decentre the human, by rendering notions of thinking, experience, and affect impersonal and by developing new models of expression and communication, then this innovation seems to be already underway in Becketts theatre of affect where the assault against language is made possible through the thematising of the body as a mode of encountering presence. The corporeal turn in Becketts drama therefore has far-reaching implications for the production of meaning in his work.

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Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Becketts critical and creative writings. He shows that Becketts aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauers seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Becketts critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauers arguments are revealed. Using Schopenhauers thought as a presiding interpretative framework, Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Becketts creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends. A central contention of this book is that to judge the place of ideas within Becketts art, we should ignore questions of their theoretical persuasiveness and consider their role as purely aesthetic devices, the value of which is revealed in terms of the existential impact they have upon his characters. In each of the chapters that deal with Becketts fiction, Barron underscores the artistically energizing tensions that exist between the concepts that Becketts characters invoke in their attempts to comprehend the import of their experiences and their conative and affective tribulations which invariably prove resistant to such analysis. Here the means by which such conceptual aporias engender semantic potentialities underpin an exploration of Becketts creative assimilation of rational discourse. While the focus of this publication is upon Becketts early and middle fiction, which was composed at a time when the relationship between the chaos of quotidian ordeals and the value of rational thought became most acutely relevant for him, numerous cross-references to his dramatic and poetical works are provided in order to highlight the overall significance of these issues within his oeuvre.

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