The Irish Sea which separates Great Britain and Ireland has often been written about in terms of divisions, threats, and hazards. Facing each other across that sea, the coast of Wales and Ireland’s eastern seaboard have a more complex story to tell, one characterised by intimate if troubled lines of connection. A place of passage for centuries, t…[Read more]

Two sections of a book comparing creation myths from ancient Greece and Rome with their Japanese counterparts from the early 8th Century Kojiki (古事記, “Records of Ancient Matters”). These fusion essays are summations of previous book sections by Greek and Japanese authors on the elements of fire and air, respectively, and, drawing from Plato and J…[Read more]

This article probes the history of education and current pedagogical practices among Malayali physician-teachers, vaidya-gurus, of Ayurveda in central Kerala. Considering the sources vaidya-gurus cite as the bases of their teaching styles, especially a three-part method known as mukhāmukhaṃ (‘face-to-face’ instruction), I discuss the place, produc…[Read more]

A bibliographical listing, including audio, video, etc., from the perspective of critical and cultural studies, on the 2020-2021 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic scare (Coronavirus, COVID-19). From ‘A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology’, 2021.

Spanish abstract: ‘Ucho’ (La oreja), película de Karel Kachyňa (1970) es una prefiguración de ‘La vida de los Otros’ sobre la Cheka checa, pero con una estética peculiar—una película entre el realismo documental y lo grotesco, algo así como un cruce entre ‘1984’ y ‘Quién teme a Virginia Woolf ‘, combinando la sátira política con la cinematogr…[Read more]

How could the ideal of a universal brotherhood of mankind be realized in an age of nationalism, colonialism and culture wars? “With God, for fatherland and humanity?” is the first comprehensive study of masonic internationalism. It explores, with a focus on England, France, Germany, and Italy, how European masonic associations promoted or opposed…[Read more]

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

The article offers a detailed analysis of the debates at the All-Russian Democratic Conference and in the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic (the Pre-Parliament), which followed the proclamation of the republic on September 1, 1917, and predated the Bolshevik-led insurgency on October 25. The two assemblies were supposed to help resolve…[Read more]

This chapter works with a mixture of discourse analysis, cultural anthropological empiricism, integration of behavioural research, and not al least conceptual argumentation. It integrates different, but corresponding strands of discussion and controversies from German-speaking politics and culture, from academic discourse, research, and art to…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: Proponemos, en contraposición a la noción de ideología corriente en la crítica cultural y ejemplificada aquí por el libro de Teun A. van Dijk “Ideología: Un enfoque multidisciplinario” (Gedisa, 1999), una noción de ideología más interaccional, más dialógica y más unida a las situaciones efectivas en las que la ideología s…[Read more]

In this chapter, I am chiefly interested in articulating a theoretical claim that cooperatively run schools can educate the commons causally and reproductively. Cooperatively run schools educate the commons because going to school at a cooperative can cause commons to come about by reproducing the kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to…[Read more]