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The article analyses the process of choosing different strategies of identification bythe Bulgarians in Ukraine. The present state of the “identification processes” againstthe background of the “war of memory” and the “invented traditions” places themamong the priority problems of science and politics.The subject of analysis are the specifics of the formation of collective memorywhich are at the root of the choice of identification strategy: commemorative practices,mechanisms for memorialization of the past, the correlation between the localgroup history and the national strategies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. The conclusionis that the choice of identification behaviour is influenced by the efficiency of thesocial adaptation under the specific historical circumstances. The social resources atdisposal of the group in any particular moment influence the choice of vectors of thecollective memory and predetermine the formation of defensive practices aiming topreserve the group.
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The aim of the article is to show how and to what extent global ideas for sustainable development and use of natural resources are understood and implemented in Bulgaria by revealing and analyzing some of the specifics of two parallel and interconnected trends aimed at achieving sustainable agriculture. These are organic farming and relocalization of food through the implementation of the concept of food sovereignty represented on the local level by Hrancoop movement. The views of the bio-farmers and their connectedness to the concepts of alternative agriculture are also presented, as well as the policies, regulations and subsidies in the agricultural sector and the protection of the environmental. Crucial for the producers are personal motives, interest and experience rather than particular global ideas.
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The goal of this essay is to reevaluate state socialism’s environmental record. Zsuzsa Gille argues that state socialist modernity had its own view of nature and materials, as well as a largely misunderstood ethical stance to consumption that is ignored in today’s studies of capitalocene examining the interrelations of capitalism and climate crisis. This article provides a view not so much of the environmental advantages and disadvantages of central planning or “backwardness,” but rather demonstrate a unique economic logic that arguably carried some potential for a greener postsocialism. Instead of returning to the rightfully criticized Anthropocene term, however, Zsuzsa Gille argues for a more central role for waste and materiality in our understanding of the current dilemmas around global environmental problems.
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This essay employs contemporary peasant mobilizing discourses and practices to evaluate the terms in which we understand agrarian movements today, through an exercise of historical specification. First, it considers why the terms of the original agrarian question no longer apply to agrarian change today. The shift in the terms corresponds to the movement from the late‐nineteenth century and twentieth century, when states were the organizing principle of political‐economy, to the twenty‐first century, when capital has become the organizing principle. Second, and related, agrarian mobilizations are viewed here as barometers of contemporary political‐economic relations. In politicizing the socio‐ecological crisis of neoliberalism, they problematize extant categories of political and sociological analysis, re‐centring agriculture and food as key to democratic and sustainable relations of social production.
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It doesn’t take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and populations fleeing the unbearable heat towards polar redoubts. The UN directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that ‘within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions’ – but that assumption ‘was obviously fallacious’. A drowned world would be nothing like the one hitherto known. In more recent years, the American military establishment has dominated this subgenre of climate projection. Extreme weather events, the Senate learned from the 2013 edition of the ‘worldwide threat assessment’ compiled by the US intelligence community, will put food markets under serious strain, ‘triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism’. So far, the sworn enemies of revolution have dominated this frenzy of speculation. Little input has come from the other side: from the partisans of the idea that the present order needs to be overthrown or else things will turn out very badly. But if the strategic environment of counterinsurgency is shifting, so is – by definition – that of revolutionaries, who then have just as compelling a reason to analyze what lies in store. The imbalance in the amount of preparation is glaring. Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary tradition – in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will probably always loom large – should dare to use their imagination as productively as any writer of intelligence reports or works of fiction. One might begin by distinguishing between four possible configurations of revolution and heat.
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The following research is historical and pedagogical and it aims to put an emphasis on the form development and contents line of the extracurricular education in children’s organisations in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1990. The specific kinds of extracurricular education, intellectual, patriotic, international, aesthetic, moral, physical and one related to labour are presented with their specific features typical for the separate stages of the researched period as well as with their correlation. The reconstruction of extracurricular education in children’s organisations, dating back from half a century, is of specific purpose. Contemporary reflexions make it possible to apply certain extracurricular practices from the second half of the 20th century in contemporary structures concerning informal education.
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Anna Bugajska’s recent book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias (2019) is an important and thought-provoking inquiry into the field of young adult literary criticism. While for the average reader, young adult narratives may be associated with juvenile tales created with an intent to provide escapist entertainment, a true connoisseur of youth literature is well aware of an immense didactic potential of this genre. Bugajska certainly belongs to the latter category as she diligently engages with young adult dystopias to highlight the immense critical power of these texts. In the following review article, the author of the paper is going to offer a brief commentary on the critical perspective that Bugajska employs to explore the notion of evantropia. The first section of this review discusses Bugajska’s volume as a part of utopian intellectual tradition, the second section postulates that ideas presented in Engineering Youth enrich literary criticism in the field of speculative fiction and children’s and young adult literature, the third section briefly discusses the layout of the volume and the content of each chapter, the fourth section presents an overview of selected core ideas that Bugajska presents in her work and in the last section the author of the paper offers his final thoughts on Engineering Youth.
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The paper is based on the results of a study of Russian citizens’ images of their own and foreign countries. Methodology included a survey with a number of open-ended questions, in-depth interviews, methods of cartography, semantic differentials and a projective test. The study has shown that such factors as an event context, cultural traditions, psychological conditions of Russian society and communication strongly influence country’s perception. Our results have proved that Russians in general do not share territorial expansionism. Recognition of the Russian culture and the value system by others is more important for them. Though at the current moment national „inferiority complex”, widely spread in 1980–2000s, still manifests itself, a new tendency, based on the growth of a national pride that started in 2014, strongly influences social moods. Our analysis of Russians’ perception of other countries enabled us to distinguish categorization mechanisms used by our citizens. So the images of other countries include „neighbors” (post-Soviet countries), „strategic partners” (India and China), „forgotten allies” (Latin America and Africa), „significant «other»” (individual European countries and a less significant EU), „enemy image” (USA) and the „tourist Mecca” (Turkey and Thailand).
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The analysis of sociocultural responses and behavioral strategies to address the consequences of local disasters is aimed at supporting the development of models of rational and socially adequate behavior to prevent and limit the effects of disasters,which could be useful in documents and policies of an official nature among local and central authorities and increase their effectiveness.
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The article’s aim is to provide a definition of the science of communication together with the delimitation of the field of research and the identification of a general research method. The starting point is the general phenomenon of communication in the living world, as the research field of communication science is limited, by successive delimitations, to media discourses. The most important aspect that has been highlighted is the political nature of media speeches. Politics de-homogenizes the discursive mass and at the sometime provides a clear criterion for classifying discourses. Thus, insofar as communication is media-based, it is also a political communication.The science of communication is defined as the study of the phenomenon of integration and discursive distancing, in other words of the discursive competition and social negotiation. The starting point of the entire process of definition is the work“ Autonomous Discourse. Communication Strategies”(2013).
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This text is by Pyotr Savitsky, a Russian economist and geographer (1893–1979), one of the four authors who established the Eurasian movement as a post-revolutionary movement of Russian émigrés, and published the collection Exodus to the East (Sofia, 1921).
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This paper argues that what we commonly mean by “labour” in industrial democracies stems from the obsolete theoretical assumptions of neoclassical economics, which also serve as foundations for a highly entropic economic process. Therefore, to determine the new purposes and functions of what working means is necessary in order to redesign economy and, consequently, to offer an alternative to the Anthropocene. The article develops Bernard Stiegler’s take on work and discusses the way Stiegler brings up to date the theoretical reflection on the transformations of work undertaken by André Gorz. The article addresses the question of work in relation to energy crisis and work automation. Advocating for a redefinition of work beyond employment, the article envisages work automation as a new opening for what work denotes, rather than the end of work. However, two conditions must be met in order to make such a change possible; it is necessary to redefine work beyond employment and socialize benefits from work automation.
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In the article, it is argued that in order to rejuvenate critical theory we need to revive the critique of technology first and, by the same token, redefine the very concept of critique in the context of the digital reality, with an account of how digital devices impact our ability to think in general. The function and meaning of critique under new circumstances (conceptualized as technostress) is discussed in a dialogue with three thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Stiegler. It also suggests how Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical critique can be fruitfully these combined with social theory developed by Hartmut Rosa.
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The main purpose of Helena Barbara Balcerek’s article is to present an original project aimed at the amplification of both the language potential (communication competences) and the literary-cultural potential of sixth-grade primary-school students. The project’s method consists in problem-based learning which integrates literary-cultural content-oriented teaching and language education (including rhetoric) with educational and prosocial processes. Reflections yielded by an in-depth analysis and interpretation of texts used in the project as well as discussions concerning the problem of human values and needs lead, as it turned out during the project’s execution, to ecological issues and climate challenges facing the contemporary world. A large group of students have come up with practical ideas as to the use of available resources as means to resolve the climate crisis and to undertake pro-ecological actions.
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Kordian Bakuła’s article deals with chosen problems of ecological humanities. Adolf Dygasiński’s short story has been regarded as a precursor of contemporary trends in the humanities due to the way in which it addresses issues which are alive and topical nowadays: natural cultivation of truth, sensual and direct cognition, coexistence and compassion with nature. According to Bakuła, they constitute the project of the natural secular humanities.
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Anouk Herman’s aim in this article is to introduce the ecofeminist theory of the animal subject and its absent referent in the poetry book Matecznik by Polish author Małgorzata Lebda. Ecofeminism provides tools for elaborate analysis of the conceptual connections between women (as well as persons of nonbinary identities) and animals and may be used as a theoretical background for ecocritical research on literature. Ecofeminist philosophers Carol J. Adams and Marti Kheel have developed theories regarding relationships of human and non-human phenomena. They examine the issues of sexuality and carnality in the context of the killing and hunting of animals, themes which constitute important motifs in Lebda’s poetry.
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This article explores the significance of Earth in the futurological vision presented by Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel titled 2312, maintained in the genre of climate fiction. Intense technological development together with the progressive degradation of the natural environment served as the foundation for a pessimistic perspective, which resulted in the motif of leaving our planet in order to build life anew in other parts of the universe in the literary discourse. Robinson contrasts this direction in thinking about the future with an optimistic narrative, centred around restoration and a return to roots. The text provides an analysis of such an approach, and shows the speculative nature of the picture of humanity outlined in Robinson’s novel. In addition, the aim of the article is to point out the links between the work and a trend which is developing in the space of science fiction – solarpunk.
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