Materiality, connection, meaning and process: ‘Czas Kultury’ on artificial intelligence and epistemology – and what slime mould can teach us about social organization. Also: Adam Mickiewicz’s anti-liberalism as door-opener to radical socio-political transformation.
In ‘New Humanist’, openDemocracy journalist Peter Geoghegan describes the Transatlantic networks channelling dark money into Europe’s nativist movements. Also: why the bike is the way forward – on pedal power and social change.
‘Blätter’ publishes a major new essay by Jürgen Habermas on the German-European dialectic: why Merkel’s volte face on the European Recovery Fund is a response to the delayed effects of German reunification. Also: Orbán’s hollow boast and the complicity of European conservatism; and Israeli women against Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘Varlık’ remembers the Turkish novelist, playwright and essayist Adalet Ağaoğlu (1929-2020), the great chronicler of the Republic whose work steered a course between secularization and Islamism. Also: on the resistance to the Turkish government’s proposal to exit the Istanbul Agreement.
In ‘O’r Pedwar Gwynt’, what the Welsh translation of the Rubáiyát reveals about masculinity, power and citizenship at the fin de siècle; how mid-20th century Welsh-language nature writers created an ecology without wild animals; and why the legacy of Protestant Nonconformism is hampering Welsh democracy to this day.
‘Osteuropa’ analyses Arctic geopolitics. Why the Crimea annexation turns Raleigh’s dictum on its head: a Thucydidean analysis of historical maritime strategy. And an optimistic assessment of scenarios of cooperation and conflict in the Far North.
In ‘Esprit’, African intellectuals move beyond the post-colonial question. Including Jean Godefroy Bidima on the traumas of the African past: how self-reflection can avert a future explosion. Also: Souleymane Bachir Diagne on the restitution of African artifacts and a Bantu reimagining of the museum, and Bruno Latour on ‘geosocial class’.
‘Atlas’ argues that art, like humanism, is meta-social and fundamental to knowledge. Also, why Kafka provides insight into the autistic mind; and on the unfathomable world of a Norwegian absurdist.
Germany’s recent property boom and the inequality it produces; how the new-right uses postmodern theory to propagate nihilistic anti-humanism; and why treason can be a radically democratic act.
‘Syn og Segn’ explores pandemic life through poetry, reportage and history. Why the crisis has made migrant lives harder still; how today’s risks pale in comparison with those of the past; and a corona chronicle and other poems.
We need new and updated philosophical tools to understand contemporary society, writes Göran Dahlberg in the new issue of Glänta. Whether to construct, reconstruct or deconstruct from within or outside the system, ‘old tools can find new uses and new tools can awaken old and forgotten knowledge’.
In ‘New Eastern Europe’, Ukrainian political scientist Mykola Riabchuk recalls early lessons in direct democracy; Georgian security expert Lasha Pataraia offers insights into Russian cyber-war; and Polish poet Jakub Kornhauser talks about eastern European avantgardes.
New Music mag ‘Positionen’ looks at how concepts of ‘live’ performance underwent revision during lockdown. Also: on cultivated imperfection as form of musical resistance, and why Luigi Nono wasn’t being sung from the balconies.
Greek journal ‘Historein’ looks at new research in comparative global labour. Including articles on gendered perceptions of labour in India pre and post independence; the exclusion of women from histories of IT; and what the Romanian car industry between 1968 and ’73 tells us about socialism’s role in the globalizing economy.
Mittelweg 36 dedicates an issue to sociologist George Steinmetz, winner of the 2020 Siegfried Landshut prize. Including articles on three 20th-century French sociologists whose work was both invested in and independent of French colonialism; and the critical potential of historicist sociology as alternative to default positivism.
The pandemic has exposed Turkey’s blindness to its own aging population. On the humiliation of confinement experienced by the over-65s; the demographics of a society that has not noticed it has aged; and the psychological violence done by lockdown to vulnerable groups.