This article aims to highlight the impact on local development of traditional economic activities. The case study that the authors consider concerns an area in the Romanian Carpathians developed through transhumant grazing and forestry activities: Mărginimea Sibiului. As shepherding kept developing, forest-cutting intensified to make room for pastures and hayfields, thus stimulating activities connected with the processing of wood. As trade on the Danube was liberalized under the Peace Treaty of Adrianople and cultivated lands in the south of the country kept extending, transhumance steadily lost in importance, especially in the twentieth century, in the wake of the Second World War. This process was intensified by the collectivization practised in the socialist-type centralized economy period. Currently, transhumance at Mărginimea Sibiului is practised only in four villages: Poiana Sibiului, Tilişca, Jina and Răşinari. Sheep flocks and the herd of cattle are moved from the village to the mountain pastures, along age-old pastoral paths, strictly observed and known by the rural communities. Most pasture-lands lie far from the village hearths, in the highlands. The future development of Mărginimea Sibiului involves the revival of traditional economic activities, as well as the development of tourism as a representative economic branch for this region.

In the philosophy of science, there are multiple concepts trying to answer the question of how scientists ‘know’ things, all circling around the notion of observation, thesis, falsification and corroboration – namely, the usual concepts of scientific practice. However, a whole different question is ‘how does the public know things?’. Understanding the answer to this question is crucial, since (at least in Western democracies) the public is the entity which funds, and through funding directs to a certain extent, the course of science. Here I discuss ‘the knowledge system’, a concept (proposed by the American writer Alex Epstein), which can generally be thought of as the set of institutions and processes which take part in the way the public becomes knowledgeable about certain (scientific) topics. I argue that the ‘knowledge system’ contains two inherent flaws, namely (i) the accumulation of biases; and (ii) strong feedback loops, which are almost unavoidable. I demonstrate these flaws with some examples and show how these flaws can (and already do) lead to policy suggestions that de-facto abolish academic freedom. Finally, I discuss possible ways to overcome – or at least minimize – the effect of these flaws on science and the scientific community.

We begin from the assumption that where scientific research will predictably be used to affect things of moral significance in the world, you have a special duty, a duty of care, to ‘get it right’. This, we argue, requires a special kind of objectivity, ‘objectivity to be found’. What is it that’s to be found? In any kind of scientific endeavour, you should make all reasonable efforts to find the right methods to get the right results to serve the purposes at stake and neither exaggerate nor underestimate the credibility of what you have done. That, we take it, is what in this context constitutes objectivity and intellectual humility. But where your results will affect the world, you have a more demanding duty: a duty to ‘get it right’ about the purposes the endeavour should serve. Often the most morally significant purposes are those that ‘go without saying’ and because they are not said, we can too easily overlook them, sometimes at the cost even of human lives. We illustrate this with the example of the Vajont dam design and the flawed modelling that resulted in the Hillsborough football disaster.

American sculptor David Smith moved fluidly between media to elicit the kind of aesthetic reaction that he believed was unique to and inherent in modern art. As remediation of his sculpture, Smith’s photography attains its own performative power by establishing a new aesthetic relationship with its spectators. This article applies Lars Elleström’s medium-centred model of communication to the analysis of the intermedial quality of David Smith’s photography. By emphasizing the significance of mediality and communication, it offers a new interpretation of the transmutation of modern sculpture as an alternative to modernist aesthetics. In this way, this case study of David Smith’s photography functions as an initiative of expanding the research of intermediality beyond formalistic analysis, by integrating art history with communication and media studies.

This article is a summary of a panel discussion entitled ‘Towards an inclusive and representative academic landscape’, held at the Building Bridges Meeting of Academia Europaea and the Young Academy of Europe on 26 October 2022. The panellists were Professor Yvonne Galligan, director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Comparative Politics at the Technological University Dublin, Dr Katalin Solymosi, plant biologist, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University and vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe, and Professor Stephen Curry, Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London. Dr Linn Leppert, Associate Professor of Computational Chemical Physics and board member of the Young Academy of Europe chaired the discussion.

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Comparing source and target media products is the main intermedial method for studying adaptations. The inventory of similarities and differences produced by such an endeavour provides evidence for the processes of transfer and transformation that have happened between the two media. But the finished media products are not the only traces of the process of adaptation. In practices of adaptation that happen inside media industries, such as film adaptations, the process is also documented in different forms and for different archival or market-oriented purposes. The process of film adaptation is, for instance, usually captured – although in fragments and in a staged format – by intermediary filmic media products – such as ‘making of’s – that are rarely considered as the main study objects in adaptation studies. As this article argues, such processual ways of looking at adaptations do not undermine the importance of comparative approaches but complicate the grounds for comparison. Suggesting a methodological shift to the process, the article expands this idea through a cross-pollination between adaptation studies and (media) production studies and exemplifies it through discussion of examples and one extended case study.

As a theatrical phenomenon, cross-dressing performance has passed down through many centuries and manifested itself in different parts of the world. In the era of film and television, it was adapted to and has appeared on screen, as a popular means of entertaining the audience, and so plays an important role in influencing public opinions on certain social and cultural issues, such as the politics of gender and interculturalism. In light of theories of gender performativity and cultural agency, the intermediality of cross-dressing performance is approached in this article, mainly based on a careful analysis of Li Yugang’s solo shows on TV, the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine, and the American film M. Butterfly. By having the intermedial intersected with gender and interculturalism, this article argues that intermedial cross-dressing performance, on the one hand, has transformative power over gender politics, as it contributes to the gradual acceptance of differences in gender as well as other social categories. On the other hand, in some cross-dressing performances on screen, the subversive and the reiterative are blended together in cross-dressing performance, which undermines the legitimization of sexual orientations outside of the heterosexual norms. In addition, the entanglement of intermediality and interculturalism in cross-dressing performance in such a film as M. Butterfly contributes to critical reflections on cultural and categorical boundaries, which has profound implications for cross-cultural communications.

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

Over the past several decades, historians of Medieval Europe have worked to show the complexity and diversity of Europe’s religious, linguistic and cultural landscape. Medieval Europe was neither a multicultural paradise nor an ethnically pure enclave. Archaeology, ethnolinguistics, literary studies and textual studies all show the constant movement of populations into and across Europe, from earliest antiquity until today. I have participated in two European-funded projects that explore different aspects of that religious and cultural diversity. From 2010 to 2015, I directed an ERC advanced grant entitled ‘RELMIN: The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th–15th centuries)’. Since 2019, I am one of the four directors of an ERC synergy grant, ‘The European Qur’ān,’ which explores the place of the Qur’ān in European culture between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. This article presents these two European research programmes and their implications for understanding the history of Europe’s religious diversity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has finally reached most people on our planet thanks to generative AI tools for text and other media. This has started a controversy about the possible benefits and risks, where responsible AI is key. Hence, we introduce the concept of responsible AI, its relation to AI ethics, and why the terms ethical or trustworthy AI should not be used. We then cover the three main relevant aspects of this new field: principles governance and regulation.

The purpose of this article is to discuss practical solutions to the threat to free inquiry at universities coming from the illiberal left. Based on my experiences at the University of Chicago, I propose that all universities should adopt and enforce rules requiring that: (1) the university, and any unit of it, cannot take collective positions on social and political issues; (2) faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration; and (3) free expression be guaranteed on campus, even if someone claims to be offended, hurt or harmed by it. Faculty need to work together with students, alumni, journalists and politicians to get this done.

Based on a rough conceptual divide of (parts of) media studies, including intermedial studies, this article presents two positions based on interests in media as transmission and representation, or media as ecological frame, or media agency. Following that, the article discusses how a new concept in environmental studies, ‘environing media’ or ‘environing technologies’ – where representation and media ecological agency seem to find a fruitful meeting point – is discussed in more detail. That description and discussion are put into a debate with central ideas of intermedial studies, before the final part of the article briefly exemplifies the theoretical ideas in the case of the IPCC report’s Summary for Policymakers (2021).