Arts & Humanities
Smooth sailing: Wind, water, and Viking voyages
Misconceptions about the Vikings are more numerous than facts, one being their portrayal as sailors blindly battling through cold, fog, wind, and turbulence. Through scientific research and their own voyage on the (not so) high seas, Professor William Doolittle (University of Texas) and Professor Stephen Stadler (Oklahoma State University) have dispelled this myth. Summertime winds and currents would not have […]
From what’s wrong to what’s strong: A guide to community-driven development
There are four main modes of social change: to, for, with, and by. While there is a place for all four within community and economic development, avoiding the pitfalls of traditional ‘aid’ requires a well-delineated approach. As the Managing Director of Nurture Development and a faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at DePaul University, Cormac Russell is […]
Philosophy and Critical Theory: Shining a light on Saladdin Ahmed’s research
Saladdin Ahmed is a philosopher and critical theorist. His works focus on the philosophy of resistance, antifascism, totalitarianism, and political space. For the last three years, he has been teaching political theory, international relations, and comparative politics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. During that time, he has published, among other works, a book Totalitarian Space and the Destruction […]
Cinematic cruising: Reel and real spaces between imagination and experience
What do going on a cruise and visiting the cinema have in common? Professor Anton Escher, Dr Marie Karner and Helena Rapp, at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, believe these two seemingly different activities share a lot in common. Delving into an area of study they feel has been overlooked until now, they explain how film representations affect a cruise passenger’s […]
Digital Assyriology: Using artificial intelligence to unlock an ancient lingua franca
The ancient writing system of cuneiform was used to record millennia of human history, but relatively few of the hundreds of thousands of known cuneiform texts have yet been translated and made available to researchers and the public alike. The Babylonian Engine project, led by Dr Shai Gordin of Ariel University, Israel, has developed two tools – Atrahasis and Akkademia […]
Is the Corona pandemic a gateway to global surveillance?
For the first time in human history, digital surveillance technologies have allowed governments around the world to monitor almost everyone, almost everywhere, almost all the time. The public has largely accepted such measures as necessary in the fight against the Coronavirus. But are we right to passively accept the abandonment of our right to privacy – a fundamental human right […]
Artistic expressions of 21st-century change
Suzanne Anker is an artist and theorist from New York City, chair of the School of Visual Arts’ Fine Arts Department. She is also founder and director of the School’s Bio Art Laboratory, a state-of-the-art facility which gives artists a place to bring together scientific and artistic methods to create a dialogue concerning the current state of nature and science. […]
The knowing child’s quest in contemporary American fiction
The image of an adolescent growing up and making sense of the world is a familiar icon in many cultures around the world. Yuki Namiki from Tokyo Kasei University in Japan looks at how two 21st century American novels use the trope in line with literary tradition but also depart from it to explore family relationships in contemporary society. Both […]
Dear Mr Hume, your circle might actually be a spiral
Induction is typically understood as a process of deriving principles or laws from particular or individual instances. The Empiricist David Hume argued that such generalisations about the world cannot be justified using deduction (a logic-based method of reasoning), and that induction is in fact worthless, circular reasoning. However, Professor Uwe Saint-Mont of Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences in Germany argues […]
How cultural institutions prevent stigma around Lake Victoria
Professor Koen Stroeken proposes a new method of analysis for understanding cultural practices. His method extends beyond the situational analysis by intervention professionals to focus on the logics of action embedded within cultural traditions. He applies his proposed method of Cultural Analysis to describe the layered meanings within various rituals of Sukuma farmers in Tanzania. He argues against popular understandings […]