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The ambition of this paper is to say that if "cultural science" accepts the need to rethink culture along scientific rather than just critical lines, then at the same time physics must rethink its own commitment to "culture-free" methodology. That has only yielded what we might call "meaningless universe theory," without addressing ways that physics as a discourse is strongly marked by culture, with the usual signs of gender, race, and hegemony present in its methods. It needs to take responsibility for applications of its discoveries that enter the cultural sphere only to threaten its total annihilation. An alternative to meaninglessness might be to take more seriously the marginalized and derided cultures of everyday thinking, as is attempted by Bogna Konior, and for physics-as-a-discipline to join the effort to reform science. If self-criticism is good for the cultural goose, then it's good for the scientific gander; and a "cultural science" should say so. Since physics is the most scientific and least cultural of the sciences, this paper uses it as a limit case of knowledge realism. I argue that a science of culture requires reform of the ideology and applications of science as well as new models of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Maria Racu’s exegetical volume - The Thanatotic Imaginary in the Lyric of George Bacovia and Ion Minulescu. The theme addressed by the author, perhaps more topical than ever, illustrates the symbolic representations of the imaginary of death/Thanatos in the poetry of our two poets: George Bacovia and Ion Minulescu. This article follows Maria Racu’s research approach, identifying the reading grids and the aspects of novelty in the space of the literary imaginary. The directions of analysis will include images of temporality, Bacovian space and hypostases of the erotic in Minulescu’s poems, as well as catamorphic symbols in symbolist poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between digitalization and the modernization of capital stock in different sectors across European countries. It reports that higher digitalization is associated with a more modern capital stock, but comprehensive modernization requires broader investment activities beyond digitalization subsidies. It highlights digitalization's role in supporting ecological transformation and climate goals.

The sinking of the Titanic had a great impact on people around the world. It also attracted great thinkers to reflect upon the incident, go beyond it, and formulate the disaster in modern times. Thomas Hardy's composition, one of the earliest writings on the Titanic, brought forward the idea of "Immanent Will"; its relation we will trace back to historical human will. George Bernard Shaw's dispute with Arthur Conan Doyle shows how the Immanent Will relies on literary devices to modify reality and disaster. Joseph Conrad's deliberations are the instance when one can see that the modern human has summoned powers beyond his control which are disastrous and void of humanity. Finally, Gilbert Keith Chesterton demonstrates the psychological process in which humans act void of compassion and create disastrous modernity. The Titanic disaster is the opportunity to gaze at the inevitable disaster inherent in modernity and formulate its internal logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This allegorical postcard is organized around two groups of photographs. The first group was the result of a joint collaboration with the Vancouver artist Scott Saunders and produced photographs which have peppered several of my previous texts published by American, British and Canadian Studies. The second is a series of photographs taken by Scott Saunders from the window of his apartment in Vancouver in which he documents the street life constantly ebbing and flowing on the sidewalk below. The catalyst for bringing these two groups together was a photograph I took several years ago in Sambro, Nova Scotia (a small fishing village located just outside of the city of Halifax) depicting a forlorn sunken fishing vessel. The term "flotsam" is applied, according to the Oxford Reference Dictionary, to "the wreckage of a ship or its cargo floating on or washed up by the sea," while "jetsam" describes the things or objects deliberately "thrown away, especially from a ship at sea and that float toward land." Combined, these images of words and devastated human beings are caught in an apparently endless circulation of violence and contingency located at the heart of the urban fabric of a modernity bereft of any horizon of hope, redemption, or rescue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study scrutinizes Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt by analyzing the various forms of violence against the protagonists, Maha and Hannyeh, their heterogeneous representation and their conditions within the cultural encounter between modernity and traditionality. Applying postcolonial feminism, the analysis of Faqir's novel shows that colonization and patriarchy interact as double structures of oppression that produce cumulative forms of violence against the colonized women. It also shows that these women's responses to oppressions are divergent: while Maha adopts unique strategies of self-empowerment that help her resist subordination, Hannyeh espouses limited ones that intensify her disempowerment. As for the encounter between modernity and traditionality, the analysis indicates that imperial colonization and its modernity have destructive consequences on the colonized nation: they blur both its social formation and cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]