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Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism's global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God's infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the "evils" of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia's agro-exporter economic model as part of God's providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia , that is, God's government of earthly affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This (recently republished) book presents an anthropological study of the Scottish fishing community residing in Ferryden and the impacts of their wider social setting. Jane Nadel-Klein, the author, has eloquently woven together her twenty-five years of anthropological studies with a wide body of literature and disciplines spanning many decades, incorporating a breadth of material culture that illuminates topics and brings the themes of the book alive. The narrative takes the reader through time, studying the origins of fishing in the Scottish economy through to the processes of modernisation and globalisation that marginalised fishing-folk and ultimately ended their way of life in Ferryden. The intention of this publication was to bring the voices of fishing-folk to a wider public, such as academics, policy-makers, and those generally interested in fishing culture, rural and heritage studies. To her credit, Nadel-Klein manages to do that in a way that is accessible to all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India" by Nicholas Hoover Wilson explores the history of the East India Company (EIC) and its impact on India. The book highlights the EIC's trade monopoly, which generated wealth for its merchants and allowed the Company to exert control over India. The author argues that the EIC's history is marked by accusations of corruption, which reflect a broader struggle over the meaning of corruption in modern Britain. The book examines how different conceptions of corruption shaped the EIC's transformation into a new kind of organization with a new relationship with the British state. Overall, "Modernity's Corruption" provides valuable insights into the EIC's role in shaping the modern world. [Extracted from the article]

Established in 1947, the house of Pucci is best known for its iconic prints. Yet even before the Puccimania of the Swinging Sixties, commercial sewing patterns were an important part of Pucci's popular reception. Over the course of almost two decades, Emilio Pucci licensed his fashion designs with American pattern companies including the McCall Corporation and the Vogue Pattern Service, the independent offshoot of Vogue magazine. This preliminary overview documents how Pucci's work was represented and marketed to home dressmakers during this period (1956–73). A look at vintage Pucci patterns in context shows how this designer licensing intersects not only with trends in luxury sportswear and textile development but also changing ideas of leisure, modernity, and Italian fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, which is part of a larger book project, reflects my interest in rethinking concepts of Black modernity and speculating on its possible manifestations in different forms at different historical moments. Specifically, I posit the emergence of an urban Black modernity in US northern cities during the antebellum era. I begin by mapping a literary history of urban modernity in periodical culture over a span of 150 years. I examine its origins in Richard Steele's Tatler (1709–11) and Joseph Addison and Steele's Spectator (1711–12), which detail the rise of modern London and its new middle-class subjects, whose conspicuous consumption demanded the regulation of taste, deemed a crucial marker of modernity. This urban modernity is then reconfigured across the Atlantic in New York, specifically in Washington Irving's Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent (1802) and Salmagundi (1807–08), which anatomize the behaviors of New York's social elite. I then elucidate how a group of Black New York correspondents to Frederick Douglass' Paper (1852–55)—notably James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, and Philip Bell—take up and repurpose such representations of urban modernity to define the taste of the city's Black urbanites and meet their intellectual, social, and political needs at mid-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an “art form of healthiness and honesty” from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the Chinese customary ritual of burning paper money to commemorate the dead ancestors challenges the nature-culture dichotomy. The paper argues that the practice of burning paper money reflects a Chinese cosmology that is not based on a dichotomy between the living and the dead, instead, the dead is often mobilized to exert influential power over the living. The paper money that people use in such rituals are active actors that participates in people's social, cultural and economic life. The paper also investigates how the conflict between government policy and traditional practice demonstrates that the modernists' efforts to mobilize modern dichotomies have failed to triumph over the entanglement among networks of the living and the dead, the human and the spirit, the object and the subject, nature, culture, and super-nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of 'plasmas' – 'charged' sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy's critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy's reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the 'individual' without dismissing the 'communal' collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy's anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to 'contemporise theory'? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to provide some clues and red threads through the magisterial work of Eric Santner. The first part takes the point of departure in his book on Schreber (My Own Private Germany) and tries to lay down a basic narrative that subtends most of Santner's work and can be encapsulated by "the secret history of modernity." This narrative is briefly spelled out through the relationship of Schreber the father (the "surplus father" as the continuation of the enlightenment), Doctor Flechsig (the seminal representative of the modern university discourse), and Schreber the son, the embodiment of the symptom of the progress of modernity. The second part of the paper scrutinizes three interrelated concepts proposed by Santner, too muchness, the surplus of immanence, and manatheism, which provide conceptual tools to address the break of modernity. The three concepts are brought into relation with the historical placement of psychoanalysis in modernity, the dialectic of "what remains" and the emergence of the new, and finally with the nature of the exception pertaining to the notion of the surplus. The last part, "the punning of reason," examines Santner's frequent use of puns ("puncepts") as a conceptual strategy to deal with the paradoxes of universality. Punning is taken not as an addition or embellishment but as a poignant way to propose a new status of universality, related to what Lacan named lalangue. The three different perspectives try to show the different ways by which Santner's work addresses the core conundrums of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the World Religion Paradigm (WRP) dominating religious studies, advocating for a decolonial approach that focuses on diverse and often marginalized religious expressions. The approach that prioritizes world religions over the rich diversity of religious expressions in multiple modernities turns out to be insufficient and biased. Through theoretical research, this paper explores the implications of multiple modernities for the religious landscape. Drawing on Eisenstadt's theory of multiple modernities, the analysis critiques linear notions of modernization and secularization, and it highlights the complex interplay between religious centers and peripheries. It develops a critical examination of how the theory of the Axial Age, by prioritizing elites and centers in the historical genesis of world religions, generates a preconception that overlooks the religious and spiritual productivity of the peripheries, which persists within current interpretative frameworks. To emphasize the dynamic between center and periphery as a key factor in understanding religious diversity, the text proposes some theoretical theses. By embracing a diversity paradigm and decolonizing frameworks, this paper offers a more inclusive understanding of religious phenomena, contributing to a broader discourse on religion and spirituality beyond Eurocentric perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic and hagiographical works of early modern north Indian saints constitute a rich case study for understanding the relationship among changes in language, material practices of writing, and ideologies of writing. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the commitment of the vernacular language of bhāṣā to writing had the effect of reconfiguring practices and ideologies of writing, posing a serious challenge to the epistemic and cultural privilege formerly accorded to writing in the literary, intellectual, and religious traditions contained in Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic. Although unable to completely escape the conceptual structures of a postliterate society, these supposedly illiterate, subaltern poet‐saints were able to undermine systems of religious and intellectual authority by questioning the ontological status and epistemic utility of written language and by divesting writing of its aura. They did so by emphasizing the materiality and banality of writing and by characterizing inscription as just another form of worldly labor. Such readings of the saints' poetic works are made possible precisely by their authorial personas as subaltern, illiterate figures, and these personas are in turn established not in the poetry itself but in the hagiographical works that narrativize these saints' lives. Importantly, these hagiographies reflect a concern with historicizing both the saints' utterances and the material processes through which those utterances came to be written down. Perhaps paradoxically, it is this concern with historicity that enables the tradition to establish the transcendent nature of the saints' speech and thought, and to enable those in the present to recreate the transformative speech acts that the hagiographies describe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of Modern Studies, a school subject unique to Scotland. First taught in the 1960s, Modern Studies was originally conceived as an option for students discontinuing their studies in history and geography. Since then, though, Modern Studies has carved a distinctive curricular niche and has become one of the most popular subjects in Scottish schools.Despite this popularity—or, perhaps, because of it—Modern Studies has not received the same critical analysis as other subjects in the school curriculum. The subject remains one defined by its content (political literacy, social issues, and international relations), rather than by its disciplinary or epistemic underpinnings.This paper uses Toulmin’s (1990) conception of modernity to analyse course documents and examination papers. This analysis suggests that Modern Studies was imbued from the start with three foundational assumptions. First, a positivist ontology that believes certainty about the social world is possible. Second, a belief that Weberian means-end rationality is the most appropriate approach to evaluating and making sense of social relations. Third, a telos which positions liberal capitalism as the inevitable end-state of human affairs. Modern Studies is, therefore, not just ‘modern’ but modernist.The paper explores and develops these critiques with reference to specific examination questions and concludes by proposing a programme for renewing and reinvigorating the subject in an age of epistemic uncertainty and global environmental crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to point out some elements concerning the importance of the Essay in shaping Latin American critical thinking. To this end, it proposes to interweave two specific moments. Namely, the theoretical consideration of the epistemological value of the essay advanced by the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and its particular function for Latin America, drawing on the historical context of Hispanic-American modernism, which covers the period of transit between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is asserted, by means of this relational procedure, is that the use of the essay, a form of knowledge linked to the process of European Enlightenment, was paramount to establish both the lines of action and the very particularity of this region, as well as to base what can be considered a form of Latin American critical thinking. Additionally, this paper argues that its use was a matter of historical awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are numerous conceptions of violence today, such as physical, psychological, emotional, structural, and epistemic. The question of which social phenomena are to be described as violence is itself a matter of furious dispute. In social theory, there is a widespread tendency to distinguish between 'modern' and 'postmodern' conceptions of violence. In this scheme, modern violence is primarily physical, while postmodern violence takes places across a broad spectrum of forms. The paper questions this binary. The co-occurrence and conflict between these forms of violence leads to a third form, which I call refigured violence. The refiguration of violence can be observed in three developments, which are mediatisation, polycontexturalisation, and translocalisation. I provide one illustration of these considerations with the example of so-called shock sites on the internet. In so doing, I emphasise that the sociology of knowledge can provide a valuable perspective for making sense of contemporary discourses about violence in all their complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the 'ideal' academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity's disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can one write the modern legal history of the Gulf states without projecting onto the past the contemporary hegemony of the modern nation-state? What narratives other than secularization stories might be told? And what archives are available to us to facilitate such an endeavor? This paper addresses these questions with reference to Qatar, where a powerful sharia judiciary developed under the British Protectorate maintained its autonomy until the 1990s. The publications of the Presidency of Sharia Courts (est. 1958) and the work of its long-time president, Shaykh ʿAbdallāh b. Zayd Āl Maḥmūd (1911–97), suggest that oil wealth, modern state bureaucracy, and the British legal order expanded – rather than curtailed – the scope of sharia law in Qatar in the course of the twentieth century. Sharia scholars and institutions reinforced the rule of law, contributed to minimizing the role of customary norms in society, replaced commercial courts and alternative modes of dispute resolution, and helped establish an autonomous legal sphere separate from political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex semantic aspects of "Transmodernity" by Enrique Dussel and "New Cultural Mixing" by Juan Carlos Scannone within the context of how Christianity's liberating philosophical framework contributes to the idea of "universality". This reconstruction delineates a analysis of the reconfiguration offered by these two authors concerning notion of "universality", on the basis of the relationship between European Modernity and Euro-North American Postmodernity, the differentiated processes of Latin American modernization and Nuestroamerican tradition's plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Soviet society featured clear nutrition guidelines and a robust plan for streamlined logistics in food processing, distribution, and consumption, all of which was aimed at building a stronger state through a virtuous transformation of calories into labor power. Such rhetoric appeared even in children's illustrated books, such as Vladimir Maiakovskii and Nikolai Kupreianov's Story of Petia, Fat Boy, and of Sima, Who is Skinny (1926). This paper shows how in the 1920s authors such as Viktor Shklovskii and Iurii Olesha turned that rhetoric on its head and pushed back against the early Soviet obsession with planning and mastering nature and the human body by employing metaphors of food, digestion, and agriculture. In Shklovskii's memoirs A Sentimental Journey (1923) and Knight's Move (1923) and Olesha's novel Envy (1927), the October Revolution itself emerges as a metabolic process on a vast scale: prerevolutionary aesthetic threads, motifs, and concepts are broken down and processed, reassembled, and repurposed into a seemingly new society and worldview, in which the individual original components are still recognizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Alicia Little’s presentation of foot-bound women in her travelogues and periodical essays. Her exploration of the anti-footbinding movement saw the dissemination of Western feminist ideas in China. However, as the article demonstrates, this cross-cultural exchange was a dominantly Western feminist movement compromised by an enlightenment project based on the notion of modern womanhood or colonial modernity. To understand the background, the article gives an overview of the history of footbinding, followed by the representation of foot-bound women in Little’s travelogues to unpack the idea of modern womanhood. Her presentation of Christianity offers important clues to understanding her writings on the anti-footbinding movement. This article also explores how Little presents her feminist and Christian ideas of modern womanhood, that are at odds with the traditional Chinese womanhood. In contextualizing Little’s role in the anti-footbinding movement, this paper reveals the complicated dynamics between Western feminism, the patriarchal Chinese society, and foot-bound women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the writings of young Iranian students in Berlin, this paper argues that the 'New Woman' of Weimar Germany was a transnational creation, imagined as the personification of modernity, and who served as a discursive trope for the aspirations and anxieties of interwar intellectuals in a rapidly changing global order. A key aim of this article is to highlight the simultaneity of changing perspectives toward women among both European and Middle Eastern intellectuals during the interwar period, and to frame their understanding of modernity within discourses of youth and generational conflict. In their push for reform in Iranian society, Iranian intellectuals transformed the Weimar 'New Woman' into a symbol for European modernity as a whole. This constructed, archetypal personification of modernity was decontextualized from the contested and politically charged debates in Germany on the rights and roles of women in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the evolutionary process of moving from traditional styles to pioneering directions in the opera genre. This phenomenon expressed itself in a mixture of styles and forms of language, in the integration of different types of artistic means of expression. Another issue would be related to the nature of the lyrical tradition, its need for preservation and continuity, and the extent to which innovation is tolerated in opera to ensure that artistic works do not cross genre boundaries. It is a new phenomenon for contemporary actors and audiences, the one present in the theater today. By examining the evolution of the art of opera, it was possible to identify the general pattern of development of innovative opera and to argue that artistic integration is the source of diversity on stage and the basis of innovation in opera production. For this purpose, a cultural-historical and historical-artistic approach was used. The academic novelty of the study consists, first of all, in the complex analysis of the sources related to the translation of metalanguage in lyrical art, and secondly, the incorporation of these sources in the academic circulation as important and significant for the recognition of the reform of the opera genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I follow trails of the auto/biographical turn in the field of gender and science, particularly focusing on women mathematicians' epistolary narratives. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of «automathographies», tracing women mathematicians' historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that letters are important auto/biographical documents in illuminating women's epistemological and intellectual involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, which included the development of mathematical sciences, but was also expanded in the wider cultural formations of the European modernity. In doing so, I deploy the notion of «epistolary sensibility» as a methodological and epistemological approach to archival research with women mathematicians' letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his seminal work Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe highlights the tension between tradition and modernity as a dominant theme that reflects the complex struggles faced by individuals and societies in the midst of change. Achebe's portrayal of the Igbo community's challenges resonates beyond its setting, speaking to broader societal debates on identity, cultural evolution, and the complexities of historical transformation. In this respect, this paper delves into the multifaceted exploration of the theme, investigating characters' attitudes towards change and progress while highlighting the profound consequences of either upholding traditional values or embracing modernity. Through a close analysis of key characters, their interactions, and their choices, the paper uncovers the intricate balance between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the inevitable pull of progress. By examining the characters' dilemmas, this paper sheds light on the universal human struggle between the comfort of established traditions and the allure of embracing new ways of life. In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of Achebe's narrative artistry and the thematic relevance of Things Fall Apart in contemporary discussions on cultural dynamics and societal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current scholarship on the Uyghurs eclipses the fact that before the present moment of profound crisis, a robust polite society of the indigenous ethnonational communities existed in Xinjiang in the 1980s. This paper, by uncovering the little-known history of the Urumqi-based Tianshan Film Studio and its cinematic production of the non-Han population as the cultural majority of the region in the 1980s, adds to the academic literature that has firmly pushed against the state tropes of Xinjiang as a restive Muslim backwater with little skill in negotiating modernity. By intersecting institutional history, close reading of concrete filmic texts, and the larger historical context of what I argue as a decade of cultural rule in China's governance of its ethnic frontiers, this paper presents a fresh look at Uyghurs and their ethnic allies in the polite bargaining with the Chinese state for their cultural majority status in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a movement of attraction and repulsion between the ideas of Mário de Andrade and Walter Benjamin on cinema, in this paper are presented simultaneities in the reflection of both authors on the new art. With this aim, it develops a reflected reading of Mario's essays of the 1920s, contrasting with the Benjaminian discussion of the following decade. Although conceptually about Art as Photography the author are not in agreement each other --about a new aesthetic sensitivity that is established in modernity where the image begins to place itself as an aesthetic foundation even in non-cinematographic--, Benjamin's analytical hypothesis may sustain a reading of a novel like Macunaíma, by Mario. Then, the paper discusses the tension in the Brazilian essayist and novelist Oeuvre, paying attention to how Art as Photography stands as power in its own aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the introduction and indigenisation of western ice sports in modern China, unpacking their socio-cultural implications and intersection with nationalism. Utilising historical records, this paper employs a perspective centred on Chinese society, emphasising the nuanced adaptation and incorporation of these sports within the distinct socio-cultural landscape of China. This perspective reveals the significant role ice sports played in shaping modern self-identity among Chinese youth, driving societal change, and highlighting the confluence of athletics and nationalism during the Republican period. Furthermore, the paper underscores how ice sports in modern China mirrored larger societal dynamics of assimilation, adaptation, and redefinition, culminating in an enriched local culture that symbolises China’s resilience and adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an introduction to a special issue of the journal "Histories" on the topic of "Images of Nature." The issue originated from a conference on "Nature" at the University of Geneva in 2022 and aims to explore the historical development and changing perceptions of nature. The call for papers focused on the impact of religion, science, and environmentalism. The selected papers cover various time periods and themes, including late medieval/early modern scholarship, the transition to modernity, western alternatives, and global outreach. The document also discusses the dissemination and popularization of the concept of "nature" and its translation into different languages and cultures. The article within the document explores the historical development of the concept of 'nature' in European academic circles, discussing the influence of physicians and theologians in shaping the understanding of nature, the emergence of the nature-culture dualism and its connection to power relations, evolving ideas about souls and their attribution to different beings, and the challenges of achieving balance and understanding diverse perspectives in historical research. [Extracted from the article]

This Introduction to the Special Issue on moving post-socialist publics aims to lay out how existing mobility politics and discourses in the region under scrutiny are intertwined with historical, socialist-era mobility practices, and infrastructures. Mobility paths and policies are imbued with a contested understanding of socialist legacies as well as capitalist realities. The Special Issue explores how transport options and choices confront citizens with social diversity, transformations of social norms, institutions and routines, values, concepts, and traditions. Valuable lessons can be learnt in terms of critical mobility geographies beyond the region as post-socialist transformations address justice and changing social norms and understandings of state roles. A decolonial inspiration that challenges existing readings of the formerly socialist region and transgresses the analytical "Othering" of its transition experience can be traced throughout the papers. Instead of arguing whether or not post-socialism is still a valid analytical framework, authors see the region as marked by multiple experiences of modernity and coloniality. In the former Soviet peripheries, urban mobility shapes socio-spatial contentions, making visible multiple and conflicting narratives of modernity and coloniality, tracing flows and dependencies at different scales, and taking into account complex constellations of actors, cultures, and materialities. The post-socialist lens is meant to critically scrutinize continuities and changes, providing particular interpretations for contemporary issues: mobile post-socialist publics are thus a turn away from what was before but in a context in which a strong relation to the past is embedded in several continuities in institutions, materialities, and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Press advertisements are a key source for the history of Jewish occultism in Eastern Europe. From the late nineteenth century, modern occult currents engaged many Jews in Eastern Europe, who consulted with mediums, attended occult performances and lectures, and consumed occult literature, whether in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, or Russian. For these Jews, the hidden realities represented by occultism conveyed practical knowledge, entertainment, assurance, and the possibility of belief in a higher reality. Their occult activities left a paper trail in the form of advertisements placed in Jewish newspapers across Eastern Europe. This article considers occult-related advertisements published in the Jewish press in early-twentieth-century Poland, arguably the centre of Jewish occultism in Eastern Europe. By tracing occult advertisements across four decades of the Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish press in Poland, a picture emerges of the dynamic occult marketplace that reached Jews across Eastern Europe, the economics of this marketplace, and the social changes that spurred its development. Jewish press advertisements thus not only shed light on the physiognomy of Jewish occultism in Poland in the early-twentieth century, but also tell us a great deal about Jewish experiences of modernity in these years as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout human history, people have always produced waste, but during the last century, this has shown explosive growth. Globally, a combination of rising incomes, urbanization, the development of new, cheap materials, and changing lifestyles have driven the growth of products that were designed to be used for only limited periods of time producing a totally unprecedented amount and variety of waste. However, this development has not affected all people in similar ways. Waste has been a marker of unprecedented but unbalanced efficiency, wealth and power, and conflict. Five articles address waste as a function of conflicts in areas in various places in Europe and Asia. Collectively, these papers shed an unusual light on the twentieth century world through a collection of cases, in which conflicts have tended to exacerbate challenges of waste, either by increasing the quantity of weapons and their (often toxic) remains, or by creating contexts in which the confrontation with adversaries often relegated environmental, social and health-related consideration to the backstage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the fundamental challenges facing higher education is the much-needed confrontation of the legacies of colonialism which are hidden behind the claims of universality, neutrality and objectivity in knowledge production. From the vantage point of the present, Mahmood Mamdani, is one of the scholars who have given an account of colonial rule, its main characteristics and consequences of colonial conquests in a telling manner that renders transparent how the universalising structure of political modernity produced the colonised as subjects of difference. In his writings, Mamdani has connected the diverse experiences of the post-colonial world and flagged modernity as very pivotal in understanding the politics of knowledge production because it was crafted by the colonial project which centred on producing colonial subjects of difference within the hegemonic European thought. Mamdani's main contribution is his use of historical analysis from the vantage point of the present to offer a productive frame of thought on knowledge production that exposes the anatomy and operation of colonialism and its universalising structures that have been inadvertently normalised as the model in knowledge production. In this article, I attempt to piece together the fundamentals of Mamdani's exposition of how colonialism was a particular variation of the discourse of difference that shaped forms of existence and knowing. Primarily using a decolonial inspired theoretical framework, the paper makes a nuanced reading of Mamdani's writings to show how his contributions makes visible the impact of colonialism as a project that is not confined to history and its pervasiveness in shaping the production of the objects of knowledge and its subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to uncover the opportunities available for the success of the "modern tradition" model included in Qatar's Vision 2030, and whether legislative and educational leaderships in Qatar grasp this concept. The study reveals a legislative trend in Qatar to combine Qatari traditions, jurisprudential schools, and modernization. Similarly, there is a parallel trend in the educational sector to align Qatari traditions with Islamic values and modern behavioral patterns. The paper also indicates that the trend towards "modern tradition" is not limited to Qatar. It suggests that the primary concern should not only be the continuity of social cohesion but also the establishment of a middle class that believes in the "modern tradition" model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel Rabinowitz (1860–1938) was one of the first Hasidic rebbes of stature to come to America. An Orthodox Jewish leader and author with uncommon historical consciousness, he strove to revitalize religion as an existentially vital facet of being. Keenly attuned to the complexities of moments of transition, he reflected on his own experience of migration. His response to modernity differs from that of most traditionalist communal leaders of his day—both those who stayed in Europe and those who came to America. In the New World, now in his sixties, his understanding of Jewish history and the ongoing transformation of modern Jewish society and self continued to evolve as contemporary challenges demanded new responses. His life and works— written in Hebrew in a strikingly modern idiom—add important dimensions to the story of Hasidic migration, resettlement, and spiritual revival during a volatile historical era. Retracing his long path from Ukraine to New York, from the “valley of slaughter” to the goldene medina, through close readings of ego-documents and other resources that have received little attention to date, this paper considers his importance as a Hasidic figure worthy of note [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines literary and cinematic representations of ethnic frontiers in China in the 1980s to illustrate how they serve to express intellectuals' different views of China's sociopolitical condition, especially ultra-leftist history and the burgeoning market economy. Works under examination include Zhang Nuanxin's Sacrificed Youth, Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women, Tashi Dawa's "A Soul in Bondage," Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief, and Zhang Chengzhi's The Black Steed. These different discourses of ethnic frontiers contest with each other, reflecting intellectuals' disagreement over how to understand China's past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we queer the understanding of urban spaces to move forward a utopian project. 'Let this be a new town unfettered by the traditions of the past, a step into the future', proclaimed Nehru about Chandigarh. Designed by Le Corbusier and his team in the 1950s, Chandigarh was symbolically and materially meant to propel India into modernity. Although built with the ideals of socialism and secularism, Chandigarh is very much an elite city. This paper traces the Queer Pride parade initiated in the year 2013 to appreciate how non-normative groups challenge and subvert the planning of Chandigarh. Our attempt in this paper is to queer the utopian understanding of Chandigarh. We do this through a reading of pride walks as disruptive moments that assign new possibilities and meanings to public spaces. Technocratic solutions proposed as part of grand urban planning imaginations can never take us closer to utopia. Instead, we argue, it is through disruptions caused by events like pride parades that we slowly inch towards utopia. In making the above argument, this paper pushes the boundaries of both queer theory and urban utopian imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the second on life in a northern Icelandic valley in the later 1970s, early 1980s, and subsequently. While the first concerned women's work, food and clothing, this paper focuses on the farming cycle, the men's work on farms and on the central uplands; and on the social life and seasonal customs that reflected the farming year. Further papers will concern folk beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion leading to relentless hostility between the two emerged in the nineteenth century and has become a powerful narrative of modernity. Most historians of science trace the origins of the so-called 'conflict thesis' to the English-speaking world, more precisely to scientist-historian John William Draper and literary scholar Andrew Dickson White. Their books on the history of scientific-religious conflict turned into bestsellers. Yet, if we look beyond the Anglo-American world, the conflict thesis appears in new historical settings. This paper argues that the science vs. religion narrative flourished already in Germany before Draper and White announced the warfare between science and religion in England and the USA. Focusing on Germany, we aim to show that the conflict thesis emerged in a polycentric process shaped by various political, cultural, and social struggles. It became a rhetorical weapon for liberal scientists in Germany to oppose Ultramontanism and, at the same time, to discredit their rivals as unscientific, fanatic, or even as 'henchmen' of the Pope. Our paper makes a case for a decentred approach to the history of the conflict thesis, which brings to the fore specific political and cultural tensions shaping this narrative in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on an interpretation of the concept of phantasmagoria in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project according to which its meaning implies an extension of Marx's understanding of ideology that makes it encompass modern society's field of ideas, the materiality of its cultural productions, and its forms of experience in their reciprocal interaction. On this basis, and taking into account the dreamlike component that Benjamin attributes to the phantasmagorical, the paper analyses what he calls the phantasmagorias of space, linked to the figure of the flâneur, and the phantasmagorias of time, that Benjamin associates with the character of the gambler. Given the correspondence that he also establishes between these two kinds of phantasmagoria, a hermeneutical hypothesis is proposed to explain their correlation, in addition to the significance that this acquires in the Arcades Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of modernity and its association with the West and secularism is being challenged with the rise of religious movements in the age of globalisation. This provides a fertile ground for alternative modernities, disconnected from the West and secularism, to surface. This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the emergence of alternative modernities by drawing on insights from epistemic injustice and recognition theory, through an analysis of Turkish media outlets. Turkey serves as an illustrative case to examine the emergence of alternative modernities due to its long-standing tradition of incorporating Western modernity and its complex liminal identity between the boundaries of the East and the West. This paper argues that the period from 2005 to 2020 presented a window of opportunity for an alternative modernities paradigm to engage in epistemic struggles for recognition, supported by the ideological context of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP) government. This period paved the way for questioning the superiority and uniqueness of Western modernity. However, it also indicates the birth of a new form of epistemic injustice as counter-narratives defending the superiority of Islamic civilisation emerged, seeking to establish epistemic hegemony for Islam and its association with modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The main objective is to clarify the reasons for the absence of an airtight and rigorous definition acceptable in the academic field. Methods: This paper investigates the historical context of the emergence of the term and analytically compares the various attempts to control the concept. Furthermore, it compares the experiences of peoples and nations in this regard, to reach a broader understanding and more rigorous control of the concept. Results: the main results of this paper is that the concept of modernity is still in need of scrutiny. This is justified on the epistemological level by the development of novel research methods and by the discrepancies in approaching the issue from different areas of specialization. On the cultural level, it is justified by the differences between peoples and the specificities of their experience. It is here that the originality of this paper is located, its aim is not to control the concept, but to highlight that it is to remain open to multiple possibilities, away from the argument of the end of history. Conclusions: this study examines the concept of modernity and tracks the relevant attempts in this field, giving the fact that it is an ambiguous concept that generated many debate to the point of contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the case of the 2011 march against a highway project through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) in Bolivia, alongside a discussion of Max Weber's conceptions of rationality, this paper situates that demonstration in the interface between the Bolivian State's modern formal rationality with the substantive rationality proposed as 'Vivir Bien'; an umbrella term for a conglomeration of indigenous proposals for a sustainable relationship between humans and nature that goes beyond neoliberalism, colonialism, and their cultural and environmental consequences. As with any modern institution, the Bolivian State performs with modern means-ends calculations, thus subduing the transformative potential of 'Vivir Bien' as a distinct rationalism, with its means-ends framework, knowledge, and patterns of action. In a Weberian critique of Modernity, two issues will be raised. First is the need to recognize the modern state as the institutional embodiment of modern formalinstrumental rationality bound to Modernity's means-ends framework. Second, an evaluation of the possibility of incorporating other rationalisms into the modern state, allowing other means-ends valuations for state policymaking involving other patterns of action and sociality. Based on these considerations, this paper recognizes modern rationalism in contrast to other rationalisms, worldviews, and practices in a critical search for alter native approaches and proposals for attending to local and global problems threatening sustainable human existence, from environmental devaluation to social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying primarily on Bruno Latour's works, such as "We Have Never Been Modern" (1991) and "An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns" (2012), alongside influential texts by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Peter Osborne, Quentin Meillassoux, and Justine Huppe, and contributions from New Modernist Studies scholars like Sascha Bru and Jean-Michel Rabaté, among others, this paper sets two aims. Firstly, it seeks to articulate a concept of modernism distinct from both Latourian perspectives and the approach of the New Modernist Studies, but aiming to foster a dialogue between the two. I will coin it "conceptual modernism" and I will explore the way in which through "We Have Never Been Modern," Bruno Latour transcends his role as a mere sociologist of science, making a significant impact on the humanities. In the second part of the essay, I endeavor to define the paradox of modernism, characterized by a discourse asserting the failure of theories alone to accurately represent truth about reality and the world. The emerging theoretical landscape, indebted to anthropology, shaped by Latour's prominence in the early 21st century, necessitates an interaction between theory and practice. Latour brings theory "down to Earth" as I will illustrate in the final section of this paper. I will explore how Latour, as a new kind of Modernist thinker, addresses this paradox by establishing and practicing a novel "deal" between words (ideas, theory) and things (fieldwork). This involves not only traditional academic pursuits such as writing books and giving lectures but also engaging in various forms of fieldwork, functioning as an anthropologist, artist, scene director, and even a poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science as an object of knowledge has been a central concern of the social sciences since the first decades of the 20th century. However, the object itself is neither static nor unchanging, and has been transformed over time. In recent decades, the innovative approach of gender studies has gained considerable ground in the social studies of science. While some of them have paid attention to the relations of the professional field with the family sphere and have investigated the ways in which structural factors of the life course play an important role in research careers, there are still few theoretical and empirical contributions that think of science as productive work highly articulated with social reproduction. Although this axis of enquiry is still incipient in social studies of science, it is consolidated within the social sciences hand in hand with labour studies and feminist economics. Within the framework of the important contributions made, this paper seeks to review the existing literature and a conceptual approach to the understanding of scientific work and its articulations with reproductive work, taking gender as a category of analysis. The paper is organised in four parts: in the first section we will review the critiques of the concept of work inherited from modernity and we will focus on thinking of science as work with specificities; in the second section we will address the processes of social reproduction in terms of the articulation of spheres; in the third section we will consider the study of gender and science; in the fourth section, we will describe the way in which this conceptual proposal operates in the empirical study carried out; finally, we will present a systematisation of the concepts developed throughout the paper and a conceptual approach to their approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses the Hanoi Metro and its role in contemporary urban development processes in Hanoi. It aims to disentangle the complex interplay between the state's urban development goals, local mobility patterns, and Sino-Vietnamese relations that influence discourses surrounding the Hanoi Metro. This paper argues that the Hanoi Metro project demonstrates that mobility infrastructures serve as an arena for state-society negotiations in Vietnamese cities. Rooted in the state's vision of modernity, the metro is promoted as offering an alternative to individual motorized transport, improving urban traffic and mobility for all residents. However, controversies regarding corruption, safety, and Chinese involvement in the financing and construction of Line 2A have negatively affected public perception of the project during its construction period. The potential impact of the Hanoi Metro on urban mobility in a setting dominated by motorbikes is discussed using the mobilities paradigm, with a focus on local mobility practices and experiences. The findings are linked to broader discussions on Chinese investment and historically-rooted notions of modernity and civilization in the context of the long-term development goals of municipal authorities and rising anti-Chinese sentiments in Vietnamese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifestyles signify who people are and who people want to be. They contain one's value orientation toward the world. The speeding urbanization over the globe has made the urban lifestyle mainstream, and so does it in China. The overwhelming range of options in cities represents a consumerist society, but meanwhile, there is an emergent underground alternative, especially from the younger generations who are pursuing a "more meaningful life." This paper does an ethnographic study on young Chinese urbanites' engagement in a village as an essential example of this trend. It argues that young people's choice for rural life is a reaction and a resistance to the social forces of consumerism and urbanization. By reflecting on the reimagination of modernity and life politics in the changing process, the research implies that accompanied by opportunities for social change, young people's promotion of rural lifestyles could be linked to the government's development agenda, and this might potentially cause new forms of inequalities in rural development. By drawing on practical experience, the paper brings narratives about young Chinese urbanites' life choices in rural places into the discussion of modernity and life politics, hopefully exemplifying a broader sociological contribution around the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Badiou's ontological work draws attention to multiplicities - the oneness of ontology, which he explains can only become ontologically differentiated into events or sites through political, artistic or amorous practices that philosophies can think and invent from. He also draws attention to the fusion of events and sites, and he explains that events (such as producing special issues of journals located in particular sites) are reflexive. He also tells us, however, that the reflexive structure of an artistic or scientific event (such as producing a special issue of a journal) is not always immediately evident. In writing this response article I work with this concept - and probe how the production of events (such as a special issue of a journal produced in a specific site) may be reflexive. This is the purpose of the article. This response article therefore probes some of the political, structural and intellectual processes that come to shape scholarship in different sites, and here I draw on the insights into social imaginaries provided by Charles Taylor to develop a perspective on the scholarship that is reflected in this journal. Through this, I seek to open the notion of multiplicities, oneness and the particularities of our social imaginaries as themes for thinking about educational scholarship events produced within and across geo-physical, socio-ecological and socio-economic spaces in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present Derrida's reflections on Europe, which criticizes Europe's actuality while recognizing its promise to-come. Europe in modernity has been conceptualized as sovereign heading, the only one capable of governing the world. Derrida hopes for a Europe other than a super-state, closed within its borders, and an economic alliance. He works on today's Enlightenment, that is, on a new shape of Europe as a shoreline fit to welcome the other, following in the footsteps of Kant, who redefined the right of hospitality and drafted a cosmopolitan order, but going beyond his sketch. In the global age Europe must exemplarily assume The law of hospitality as its key principle, constantly seeking to translate it into political and legal acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Irish Consulate in Chicago memorialised a different occasion: the 86th anniversary of the death of Francis O'Neill (1848–1936), a Cork-born collector of Irish music in the United States. This paper posits that the sociopolitical construction "Irish traditional culture" constitutes an exercise of power over land and bodies, shaping and sustaining the structures of the island's political economy as part of a racial/colonial/imperial project. My argument centres James Byrne (1868–1931), an itinerant piper "discovered" in Kilkenny in 1903. O'Neill's account of Byrne's life demonstrates the development of an ideological narrative of tradition as the foundation of Irish modernity. To deterritorialise land-based practices and construct a White Irish citizen subject to global capital, colonial technologies of governance mobilise resources from "authentic" points of origin, inventing their administrators as the heroic saviours of vanishing culture. James Byrne, in contrast, is situated as a possession containing value to be extracted and as a contaminated body refusing to become a compliant capitalist subject harnessed to empire. By interrogating this narrative, I hope to foster nuanced discussion around the enduring structural interdependence of "Irishness" with transnational political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is the relationship between religion and sport. The aim of my considerations is to criticize the position presented by the American philosopher Eric Bain-Selbo, according to which sporting experiences may quite rightly be described as religious experiences. In the first part of the article, I reconstruct Wayne Proudfoot's concept of religious experience that underlies Bain-Selbo's analysis. I then discuss the research conducted by Bain-Selbo and the conclusions he draws from it. In the next part of the article, referring to Charles Taylor's hermeneutical approach, I show that Proudfoot's and Bain-Selbo's methodology leads to a theoretically unjustified reductionism. I argue that an in-depth articulation of individual self-interpretation allows for an insight into the dynamics of sporting and religious experiences, and thus to see the differences that separate them. In the last part of the article, I invoke the considerations of William James, John Hick and Robert Roberts and try to show that, given the moral consequences of our experiences and their phenomenological description (intentionality), the experiences evoked by sport and religion can by no means be identified with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]