Public health in twenty-first century Ghana is mired with several issues ranging from the inadequacy of
public health facilities, improper settlement planning, insanitary conditions, and the inadequacy of laws
and their implementation. This situation compared to the colonial era is a direct contradiction.
Development in the pre-colonial era to…[Read more]

Book review. Kate Langdon & Vladimir Tismaneanu “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Extending Audre Lorde’s intuition around the polysemy of the term recreation, I put forward this concept as an organizational principle. Via the framework of recreation, I want to think about some of the main political stakes of the forms used by collectivities able to act politically in the present. I transpose the double binding that Lorde a…[Read more]

Book Review Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A Sociological Study by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, ISBN 978 90 272 5854 0 (hbk), 236 pp

The two books of Robert M. Pirsig have been milestones for Design Theory through the development of a Metaphysics of Quality. This article analyses the design history of his two books that have been in print for more than 40 years. The editions range from cheap mass-market paperbacks to gilded collectors’ hardcovers. The underlying challenge for a…[Read more]

People’s relationships to paid work are many and varied. For some it is an important indicator of their identity, while for others it is a form of inescapable drudgery, boredom, or a place of exploitation. For those under- and unemployed, this unbearable state of boredom might itself be an aspiration. Current literature on queer identities and…[Read more]

This article analyses the confluence of Islamophobia and anti-government conspiracy theory in the works of the far-right think tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). He argues that, rather than only being a contemporary form of the religious and racialized demonologies that code ‘Islam’ as being the constitutive outside of ‘the ‘West…[Read more]

Kashmir weaves a rich tapestry of geographical, cultural, and spiritual heritage. Kashmir Shaivism is the crowning jewel of this spiritual tradition, of which Lal Ded is a brilliant gem, being one of the earliest women gurus of the valley. Shonaleeka Kaul translates 101 teachings of Ded and arranges them in the four chapters of ‘Life of I…[Read more]

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.” This epigraph comes from the 1850 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Helen Macfarlane, and this special feature in The New Americanist assumes that a similarly frightful hobgoblin stalks through genre fiction, too. Fantasy as a genre is haunted…[Read more]

“When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind.”
— Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”

Those of us in the academy who call cultural studies “home” often claim that one of the main things we do is to teach…[Read more]

This commentary takes advantage of the provenance established by Hoffman, et al.2018 to explore exclusionary symbol sets in Art, Astrology, and Myth within La Pasiega Gallery C in Spain. Using the One Godz paradigm plus the added parameter of U-TH dating this commentary ascribes meaning to two proximate rock art panels, one homo sapien and the…[Read more]

If we look at the past three decades in the history of Eastern Europe, Ukraine may safely be placed at the top of the chart of “unstable” states. First was the student-led Revolution on Granite in the 1990s. The outcome of that revolution was a resignation of entrenched high-ranked Soviet officials under the pressure of public opinion. Then, if…[Read more]

This article draws on the scene history of HC/punk in Bandung, specifically SXE, traced through collectives, spaces, political communities, music, gigs, zines, and merchandise. I’m trying to weave this into the history of urban youth culture in the city, reflecting both the Indonesian and the global context.

The story of Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal is arranged around clusters of sectarian narratives in juxtaposition, synthesis and conflict. The Sanctuary of Saint Patrick sits on Station Island, a small rocky islet set within the waters of the lake. The site became well known in the early Middle Ages as the place of Saint Patrick’s del…[Read more]

Book review. Marcin Moskalewicz and Wojciech Przybylski “Understanding Central Europe,” Routledge, 2017.

Book review. Abel Polese. “Limits of a Post-Soviet State,” Ibidem-Verlag, 2016. ISBN 978-3-8382-0845-9

In the post-Versailles era, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski proposed to the authorities of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus to forge an Intermarium union for the survival of their states. Piłsudski risked and pushed forward an intellectual speculation on how to strengthen subjectivity and sovereignty of the “young” states in games between major po…[Read more]

Yuriy Lypa stated in the mid-1930s: “The Ukrainian race is an island among its neighbours, an island with its own life, its own holy things and all-human values. Foreign and imposed spiritual values are worthless, and even non-imposed values are adopted in time, only if they pass the nation’s test… The Ukrainian race is an island, and this is its…[Read more]