New Technology may have unintended and even negative impacts. This article explores some new approaches in policy analysis of socio-technical networks aimed at improving foresight for technological advances.

The paper deals with the role of Latin and the whole Latin tradition (Latinitas) in East and Central Europe. The main thesis is that, when viewed from various perspectives, this tradition proves to be an integrating as well as a disintegrating factor in the cultural community of the region. Concluding remarks concern the relevance of the Latin heritage for preservation of the cultural identity in East-Central Europe.

Amongst the most significant extreme meteorological phenomena are the Sand and Dust Storms (SDS). Owing to significant amounts of airborne mineral dust particles generated during these events, SDS have impacts on climate, the environment, human health, and many socio-economic sectors (e.g. aviation, solar energy management). Many studies and reports have underlined that the society has to understand, manage and mitigate the risks and effects of SDS on life, health, property, the environment and the economy in a more unified way. The EU-funded European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action ‘InDust: International network to encourage the use of monitoring and forecasting Dust products’ has an overall objective to establish a network involving research institutions, service providers and potential end users on airborne dust information. We are a multidisciplinary group of international experts on aerosol measurements, aerosol modelling, stakeholders and social scientists working together, exchanging ideas to better coordinate and harmonize the process of transferring dust observation and prediction data to users, as well as to assist the diverse socio-economic sectors affected by the presence of high concentrations of airborne mineral dust. This article highlights the importance of being actively engaged in research networking activities, supported by EU and COST actions since common efforts help not only each scientist by shaping their expertise and strengthening their position, but also all communities.

Although tracing its origins back to antiquity, a distinctly new kind of alchemy emerged in mid-16th-century Europe. This new tradition developed out of the teachings of Paracelsus (1493–1541), a German medical practitioner who challenged the authority of university-trained physicians. He sought to establish a reformed kind of medicine based on first-hand experience of the natural world rather than dry scholastic texts. Alchemy was at the heart of this new medicine, a body of experimental practice and theory that not only held out the promise of improving the health of individuals but could also be applied to wider sicknesses of society.

Modern literary history was born, together with the European nation states, in the early 19th century, encapsulating the emerging idea of literature as an articulation of the national mentality. In tandem with other national histories of art, politics, language, religion, culture and nature, literary history took part in the creation of a national identity, as did the literary texts it interpreted and canonized along a historical trajectory with the nation state as its teleological culmination. Literature and literary histories have always been a form of cultural intervention, not just texts. This is still the case, but in a modern transnational and globalized cultural environment, inherited historical paradigms are obsolete as scientific and didactic models. Nevertheless, they still play a dominant role in our educational institutions on all levels. This article discusses the resilience of the national paradigm, points to the institutional and conceptual obstacles for imposing alternative frameworks, but also exemplifies how new historiographical routes may be found.

On the one hand, ‘interdisciplinarity’ in all its formats, ranging from multi- to transdisciplinarity, has become the focal point of research agendas and a high priority of many funding bodies, while, on the other hand, universities by and large still remain discipline-oriented. This ‘tension’ is especially manifest between ‘science’ and ‘culture’ in the sense of bridging gaps between disciplines and research domains. The main roles of the Humanities and Social Sciences can be said to be the development of critical and independent thought, the identification and dissemination of important social and cultural values, as well as challenging widely held assumptions and beliefs. This article focuses on new ‘interpretations’ of knowledge seen as the fundamental link, which can, within university programmes, raise the awareness of the importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences on one hand, but, more importantly, also put into a much wider context the different ‘knowledges’ necessary for the contemporary understanding of how ‘science’ should be geared towards the individual, society, as well as the global community at large.*

The concept of moral space is presented here, in the arguments of classical authors who treated the decay of moral space as an inevitable cost of modernity. Three areas are identified where the decay of moral space is manifested in our period of ‘late modernity’. They are: violent crime, distrust and cynicism, and the vanishing of social capital. Paradoxically, however, opportunities to overcome the current moral void are discovered in the very traits of modernity: reflexiveness and globalization. They allow the process of moral healing through the reconstitution of primordial communities, ethnic, national, religious, in an open, tolerant and ecumenical manner, as well as the constitution of new communities of universalist and global reach.

The rejection of the symbolically rather than institutionally innovative Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands as well as the show of disunity in the European Council of mid June 2005 signal the end of a long cycle, culminating in the 1990s, in which the transformation of the European Union into a full-fledged political actor seemed to be possible. For decades ahead there will be no European polity capable of powerfully co-determining the governance of globalization. This was made possible by the rarely debated democratic deficit that makes one people or government decide on issues of general European interest and uncritically glorifies direct democracy, thus opening the door to populism.

The comedy of errors which saw a majority of French citizens voting for domestic motivations, instead of focusing on the actual European issues go back to underlying troubles in contemporary democracy, but also to the contradiction inherent to the attempt to give the functional-bureaucratic EU of ‘Brussels’ a broad democratic legitimization. Rather than the now dead Constitution, it is the experience of the Europeans with common high-political acts of economic and security policy that may in the future foster their political identity in the framework of cultural diversity.

This paper examines the changes of the memorials in Lviv's representative Liberty Avenue throughout the twentieth century as they reflect the changing regimes of memory of the successive political systems, from the Habsburg Empire through the Republic of Poland, the Soviet and German occupation, the Soviet Union to the independent Ukraine.

This introduction briefly deals with the major orientations of this European Review Focus on ‘European crime fiction’. It first specifies what is meant by ‘Europe’ and which type of questions can be asked of crime fiction in view of a better understanding of Europe’s multiple and changing identities. It then presents the various contributions by linking them with the three fundamental questions of (1) circulation of crime fiction, (2) expansion of crime fiction in the broader cultural, social and economic field, and (3) the relevance of crime fiction for a thorough reflection on some properly European aspects of culture and society.

Leaving and returning are two basic themes that permeate the Portuguese symbolic imagination. I will try to follow this movement in one of António Lobo Antunes' novels, The Return of the Caravels, published in 1988. If there is a contemporary Portuguese novelist for whom the unrest and anxiety of identity and belonging are at the very core of their literary project, this novelist is certainly Lobo Antunes, in all 17 novels he has published since 1979. In each, ‘Portugal’ is much more than just the name of the place where characters live: it is a name for an anxiety about place; of course, this is not exclusive to Portugal, but it is given a distinctively Portuguese tinge through a deep reflection on the meaning of belonging. This can sometimes be quite meaningless, which is just another way of thinking about how man experiences his relationship to the earth and land. This is done, in The Return of the Caravels, by way of questioning the past and present connections of the Discoveries. How the present may endure and live up to the glorious experiences of history is at the heart of the story unfolded here, and will also be at the centre of this paper.

This paper explores the Polish opinion about German colonialism in Africa in connection with the perception of Prussian rule ‘at home’. In late Imperial Germany, Prussian Poles tended to look at the German ventures in Africa with a very critical eye. Their interest in Cameroonian issues was due to the fact that both Poles and Cameroonians were facing the same difficulties at the same time, namely German attempts to eliminate local languages in schools and to take control of the lands. By establishing a link between Polish and Cameroonian suffering, Polish patriots wanted to make Poles aware of their political, economic and cultural subjection within a global context. In a certain way, this counter-hegemonic narration was supposed to deprovincialise the ‘Polish issue’ and make it part of the broader struggle against German imperial power. The Poles, however, did not support independence for Cameroon. They used the Cameroonian issues mainly polemically in order to advance their own cause in imperial Germany.

Using the theoretical tools provided by the conceptualisations of resilience and interconnectedness, this article carries out a comprehensive analysis of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2008). The starting hypothesis explored in this article is that Happiness represents the transformational process of suffering and/or psychological wounds through the reparative agency of interconnectedness among humans as well as between humans and animals. Accordingly, this article will first demonstrate how the novel represents the possibility of healing one’s psychological wounds through the stories of Attila and Jean, the two protagonists falling in love after a chance encounter. It will then explore how the novel presents the necessity of establishing relationality between the self and the other in coping with adversities. Finally, it will elaborate on the indispensable coexistence between humans and animals in the novel, which provides the characters with the possibility for achieving the ecological self. In doing so, this article will demonstrate that Happiness succeeds in representing the need for an interdependent world and the impossibility of a sovereign self in order to achieve happiness in the contemporary age.

Starting from a distinction between different historical and philosophical concepts of ‘form’ as they have been discussed by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, this article argues that visual poetry is constituted and concretely shaped by its implicit, sometimes even explicit, reflection upon ‘form’. In three paragraphs different concepts of ‘form’ are briefly discussed with regard to selected examples of visual poems: (1) form as ‘proportion’; (2) form as the counter-concept of ‘content’; and (3) form in the sense of ‘contour’. The first part focuses on examples of twentieth-century visual poetry playing with the sonnet form and exposes its rigidly proportional visual structure. In addition, the strategy of turning form to serial account is illustrated. There is a long tradition of engaging with the sonnetʼs history and generic features via the very sonnet form, either in order to defend this highly artificial poetic genre (as an example by August Wilhelm Schlegel illustrates), or in order to criticize or parody it. Visual poetry sonnets reduce this poetic genre to its proportions, thus questioning under which preconditions the reader identifies a ‘sonnet’ at all. The second section of the article presents two examples of concrete visual poetry (by Eugen Gomringer and Mathias Goeritz) that play with the notion of ‘content’ by foregrounding this ludic element and the poetic processes that are represented indirectly by the respective poems’ visual structure. The third section is dedicated to the complementary concepts of ‘outline’ and ‘dissolved contours’, focusing on the contrast between traditional instances of the contour poem and more recent examples (Carlfriedrich Claus, Eugen Gomringer) which expose the tension between form and its dissolution.

A preoccupation with hybridity is natural in a period like ours marked by increasingly frequent and intense cultural encounters. Globalization encourages hybridization. However we react to it, the globalizing trend is impossible to miss, from curry and chips – recently voted the favourite dish in Britain – to Thai saunas, Zen Judaism, Nigerian Kung Fu or ‘Bollywood’ films. The process is particularly obvious in the domain of music, in the case of such hybrid forms and genres as jazz, reggae, salsa or, more recently, Afro-Celtic rock. New technology (including, appropriately enough, the ‘mixer’), has obviously facilitated this kind of hybridization.

It is no wonder then that a group of theorists of hybridity have made their appearance, themselves often of double or mixed cultural identity. Homi Bhabha for instance, is an Indian who has taught in England and is now in the USA. Stuart Hall, who was born in Jamaica of mixed parentage, has lived most of his life in England and describes himself as ‘a mongrel culturally, the absolute cultural hybrid’. Ien Ang describes herself as ‘an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who now lives and works in Australia’. The late Edward Said was a Palestinian who grew up in Egypt, taught in the USA and described himself as ‘out of place’ wherever he was located.

The work of these and other theorists has attracted growing interest in a number of disciplines, from anthropology to literature, from geography to art history, and from musicology to religious studies. In this issue, the contributions discuss Africa, Japan and the Americas as well as Europe and range from the 16th century to the 21st, from religion to architecture and from clothing to the cinema.

This paper’s argument is that in the case of Ibero-America, the literary or cultural insertion of elements from other places is not only or predominantly determined by the meaning that the element had in its supposed place of origin, but, rather, by the specific context where this element is subsequently placed. It is the study of this context that can generate better explanations not only about the reasons for this (and not another) element having been ‘imported’ but also about the meaning that it will have in the new context, in connection with the other elements that are also present there. After giving some answers from a selected number of scholars to the question of how does a given literary or cultural element, with an assumed origin in a given context, insert itself in another context, this paper will present, as a case study, the supposed ‘importation’ by Machado de Assis of the ideas of Théodule-Armand Ribot, demonstrating that the Brazilian author did not reproduce ‘imported’ elements, maintaining them in the terms in which they were articulated in the work of the French writer in their original context, but rather transformed them into something else.

In the most recent two decades, the political campaigns conducted by the Social Democratic Party in Romania targeted specific groups of voters, with little intention to attract new voters. The reason behind their strategy is that they could secure a relatively constant support of roughly one third of the electorate and so win the popular vote in every election since 2000. However, the 2016 parliamentary elections marked a turning point in this approach and the party used almost exclusively online marketing to organize, streamline and channel its messages. This article seeks to understand why this change occurred although it did not seem to be necessary. This change is more surprising in a context in which the main political competitors were weak and disorganized. Our qualitative analysis aims to identify and explain the main elements that determined this change. It accounts for three main variables: experiential learning, the role of a new party leader and the use of new opportunities.

This article examines the violation of longstanding scientific norms, in particular universalism, objectivity, and truth orientation by new identity policies such as the principle of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI). The imposition of this principle by public opinion, administration, and mass media, particularly in the United States but also in other countries, contradicts the principle of equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, nationality, and class, by putting the emphasis of assessment on group identities. The implementation of this principle has begun to damage careers, threaten scientists and lower standards in academia. In order to provide a historical perspective, I review how the violation of scientific norms has impacted scientific success in past authoritarian countries, in particular the USSR under Stalin, and Nazi Germany. The comparison with past authoritarian countries does not aim at equating situations from then and now, but can help understand social and political mechanisms of current events. It also highlights in a drastic way consequences that a violation of scientific norms may have for science today.