Anybody posing the question ‘What is a medium?’ has to confront the great multiplicity and broad range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To give an impression, in a rec…[Read more]

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]

This is a review of the book ‘Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World’ by Judy Grahn. This review is an effort to understand how the author’s views about the menstruation and the rise of civilisation can be reconciled.

A review of a series of interviews with prominent political theorists (Wendy Brown, Braidotti, Jean-Luc Nancy, Negri, Vogl, Esposito, Tariq Ali, Saskia Sassen, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Angela McRobbie). All of them reflect on contemporary political crises and the concept of crisis itself. This review considers their political positions as well as…[Read more]

This article traces the breadfruit tree’s strange career as an eighteenth-century superfood, its journey from the Pacific world to the Caribbean islands, and the rhetorical practices, epistemological slippages, and linguistic permutations that undergirded these developments. Comparing indigenous, Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and US-American d…[Read more]

Book review. Taras Kuzio “Putin’s War against Ukraine: Revolution, nationalism and crime,” CreateSpace Independent, in association with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, 2017

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

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]

This study charts the political, cultural and economic foundations of two inter-governmental bodies intended to emerge in the Black Sea region: the first, the Black Sea Union (BSU) was an idea developed by Ukrainian geopolitical specialist Yuriy Lypa before World War II. The second is the current Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation…[Read more]

Post-communist Ukraine is in the midst of implementing reforms which it missed for centuries. It gradually evolves into a unique geopolitical entity which, finally, acquires a fair chance to be consistent and self-sufficient. However, if the West takes a neutral stance today – as it frequently happened in history – a “decentralized” Ukraine…[Read more]

The article addresses current trends in European transformation and compares the structure which is being built to ancient and medieval empires. The imperial order appears to be productive for the EU due to it easily embraces the heterogeneity existing within the Union, as well as contributes to the strengthening of the EU institutional legitimacy…[Read more]

They say the global proliferation of colonial and neoliberal (ir)rationalities and the techno-managerial enclosure of the ‘commons’ (Hardt & Negri 2000; Harvey 2004) has resulted in a ‘foreclosure of politics’, prompting calls for a renewed technocultural hegemony for a post-capitalist future (Srnicek & Williams 2015) or a return to the revolut…[Read more]

The current study considers the data on road traffic accidents in order to see the influence of the moon on the driver behaviour by way of its position and illumination. The analysis was based on the visual tools widely used for time series data in time and frequency domains. The present study could not detect any influence of the moon on the…[Read more]

This essay situates the file-sharing website AAARG (primarily used to share academic texts in the humanities) in the context of the economics of the contemporary academy. Contingent employment prevents access to research libraries, while reduced library budgets and the exploitative practices of publishing conglomerates such as Elsevier limit…[Read more]

In the cultural and religious history of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory—a centuries-old Catholic pilgrim site situated on Station Island within the waters of Donegal’s Lough Derg—the mass drowning of 1795 stands out. The aftermath was devastating, stamping a lasting mark on the memory of place. The disaster continues to be complicated by its entangl…[Read more]

Published 5/4/2016: A deconstruction of distant reading and a close reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Rigor in Science.” The undecidability of the political and conceptual borders of the story challenges the possibility of any absolutist and orientalist cartographic project (such as Moretti’s literary mapmaking). Implications for the digital…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

This article treats late ancient rabbinic texts (ca. 1st-early 3rd cents. CE), reading them as biology, and following their ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species variation. I read sources from the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, in the Mishnah and Toseta, as expressions of a science of generation, or a b…[Read more]