Search Results (243)

This article investigates the functions of the epistolary form in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe as a means of constructing authenticity and probing what Susan Barton calls the “substance of the truth.” Two distinct forms of authenticity play a central role in Foe (1987). The first is related to the narrative conventions of autofiction, particularly fictional autobiography, the epistolary form, and what has been termed “circumstantial realism,” as exemplified by Daniel Defoe and the eighteenth-century novel. The second emerges through Susan Barton’s insistence on the “substance of the truth” (F, 51), which appears to transcend these conventions of realistic narration. By employing a different, non-realist form of authenticity, Coetzee critiques the oppression and erasure of the female writing subject and foregrounds the fate of Friday, the traumatized subaltern who cannot speak. Coetzee’s postmodern rewriting thus both employs and deconstructs the representational conventions that establish authenticity, while also revealing an ethical commitment characteristic of his work in general. Full article

The Social Study of Science (SSS) constitutes an interdisciplinary domain dedicated to examining the profound influence of social, political, and cultural factors on the development of scientific research and practice. Rejecting conceptions of science as an autonomous, self-directed enterprise, SSS posits that scientific knowledge is fundamentally a social product, deeply embedded within specific historical and cultural contexts. This field employs analytical frameworks from sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology to elucidate the practices, institutions, history, and intellectual content of science. The scrutiny of science’s social dimensions has fundamentally reconfigured understandings of scientific work and methodology. During the 1960s and 1970s, the field was significantly shaped by contemporaneous protest movements, with historical materialism emerging as a critical framework for sociologists and historians of science seeking to critique power structures and alienation inherent in scientific practices. However, a subsequent intellectual shift witnessed a movement away from this materialist approach towards postmodern and constructivist analyses. Recently, a resurgence of interest in Marxian historical materialism has become evident. This is marked by a renewed engagement with pre-World War II Marxist theorists such as Boris Hessen and Edgar Zilsel, whose works are being republished and re-evaluated in light of the ongoing technological revolution in automation and machine intelligence. This paper delineates this development within SSS, highlighting the contributions of these foundational Marxist thinkers to the critical assessment and understanding of the social ramifications of the new technological revolution. Full article

This article presents an integrated design studio pedagogy for flood-resilient urban waterfronts that employs groundscape strategies, treating the ground as an active design medium to generate hybrid structures integrating landscape, architecture, and infrastructure. Implemented at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design (Fall 2024), the studio challenged students to transform North Little Rock’s flood-vulnerable riverfront by replacing conventional levee infrastructure with ground-based public architectural interventions. The study adopts a pedagogical case-study approach, examining a studio cohort in which all projects were developed under shared site conditions, design constraints, and instructional frameworks. Five assignments progressed from collaborative precedent analysis to individual technical development, integrating computational modeling, performance simulations, and expert consultations across structural, envelope, MEP, and site engineering. Student work is analyzed through comparative sectional diagrams and selected in-depth project studies to evaluate how groundscape functioned as a shared solution type for multiscalar integration. The results show that groundscape operates productively when tested against specific site constraints rather than deployed as a generalized esthetic. In response to flood elevations, degraded ecology, and limited public access, students developed distinct ground-based operations—such as embedding, lifting, and integrating flood walls as spatial thresholds—demonstrating architecture’s capacity to mediate between civic space, environmental performance, and flood protection. By situating groundscape within a problem-oriented pedagogy, the study consolidates modernist, postmodern, and contemporary groundscape discourse and demonstrates how architectural education can engage productively with climate-adaptation challenges. Full article

Fallujah, by Jonathan Holmes (2007), is one of the archetypal examples of verbatim theatre, which addresses the truths of the Iraq War through dramatised eyewitness accounts and documentation reconstructions. Sketched in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the play reveals moral, political, and epistemological aspects of how modern warfare is presented. This article hinges on the postmodern theory of Jean-François Lyotard—especially the concepts of language games, paralogy, and the differend—to discuss the play Fallujah as a subversion of official grand narratives of the Iraq War. Through the use of testimonial intertextuality, irony and fragmentation, Holmes builds a multidimensional tableau of discourse contradictions in which truth is relative, and legitimacy is constantly deferred. The play turns into a meta-discursive critique of Western power dynamics, challenging the manner in which the knowledge is created, distributed, and twisted in the name of liberation and humanitarianism. Further, the article examines both dramaturgical and aesthetic techniques that lend truthfulness to Holmes’ concept of the verbatim approach as it dislocates the truth in relation to war and victimhood. The results help us comprehend the role of modern theatre in the reconstruction of the cultural memory and morality in the post-war era. The article concludes that Fallujah is a vivid example of postmodern theatrical resistance, an ethical and artistic response to commodity violence and the obliteration of lived suffering. Full article

This paper reconstructs the archive of Islamic humanism as a cultural resource for Critical Psychologists, addressing the geopolitical double-bind of the global Muslim population caught between Islamophobia and fundamentalism. This living archive spans intellectual contributions to falsafa (rationalism) and tasawwuf (mysticism), from medieval thinkers like Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali to modern figures like Mourad Wahba and Ali Shariʿati. While primarily philosophical, these contributions offer practical implications for psychosocial liberation. Utilizing a methodology of deconstructive unsilencing, the archive is positioned as both pluriversal and metaphorical. By analyzing the ideological mechanism of virtual internment, the paper proposes a praxis of learned ignorance and decolonial resistance to subvert the panoptic look of anti-humanism through the Real Gaze of Islamic humanism. This retrieval offers a materialist praxis seeking to overturn the (post)colonial triad of fundamentalism, parasitic capitalism, and postmodernism. In sum, the article argues that a genealogical consignation of Islamic humanism facilitates a transmodernity that integrates Totality with Exteriority, effectively negating both coloniality and antimodernity. Full article

The paper examines the poetics of graphomania as a productive aesthetic device within the Russian literary tradition, focusing primarily on Velimir Khlebnikov and extending the analysis to figures such as Fedor Dostoevsky’s Captain Lebyadkin and real authors such as Eduard Limonov, Dmitrii Prigov, and Sasha Sokolov. Building on the article’s central insight that Khlebnikov’s “bad writing,” stylistic shifts, and violations of canonical norms constitute not a defect but a sui generis artistic strategy, the study situates these techniques within broader historical and theoretical frameworks, including the Formalist concepts of parody, junior branch, and heteroglossic subcodes of poetic culture. The article traces the way Khlebnikov’s dynamic alternation of heterogeneous linguistic, prosodic, and generic registers produces a complex, unstable but grandstanding authorial “I” aligned with the traditional figure of the poet-as-character and the culturally embedded myth of the Poet–Tsar. Furthermore, it maps a genealogy of “graphomaniac” writing from the avant-garde to postmodernism, demonstrating how later authors transform Khlebnikov’s innovations—alternately amplifying, parodying, or ironizing them. Through close readings and extensive intertextual contextualization, the article argues that graphomania functions as a critical mechanism for destabilizing aesthetic orthodoxies, exposing, performing and producing literary authority, and redefining the boundaries between norm and deviation, author and character, poetic freedom and canonical constraint. Full article

This introductory essay revisits the concept of “Prague German Literature,” focusing on the Prague Circle’s engagement with enduring humanistic values amid early twentieth-century upheaval. While Franz Kafka is one of the most well-known authors of the twentieth century, this essay (and the Special Issue) highlights lesser-known Czech German authors and engages with the criticisms of the definitional boundaries of terms like “circle” and “school.” Drawing on recent scholarship, it situates these writers within Prague’s multilingual, multiethnic context and challenges postmodern approaches that reduce the literature to power discourse. Instead, it advocates for renewed attention to moral ambiguity, cultural mediation, and universal human concerns. Revisiting foundational scholars such as Max Brod, H. G. Adler, and Margarita Pazi, the essay also engages contemporary critics who propose more nuanced models of literary affiliation. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued relevance of these authors in fostering intercultural dialog and reflecting on the (in)stability of values in times of crisis, framing the contributions of this Special Issue. Full article

Generally speaking, traditional theism has stressed God’s immutability as an aspect of his transcendent reality. By contrast, modern and postmodern thought foreground the highly mutable nature of the divine across time and place, reckoning God as just a subjective concept immanent in human minds without any objective referent. Here I outline a new kind of metamodern theology that would synthesize elements from these different paradigms, suggesting a God both mutable and immanent but also ontologically real in his own right. I call this a developmental, emergent, participatory theology of harmonization—or the DEPTH model for short. After unpacking the meaning of each of these elements individually, I show how they hang together as a coherent, naturalistic theological framework with promising new interpretative possibilities and suggest directions for future work. Full article

This study explores the perspectives of monolingual English-speaking parents whose children are enrolled in elementary (Grades 1–5) French immersion (FI) in New Brunswick, Canada, where FI students learn mathematics in French. Using poetic inquiry within a feminist postmodern framework, we analyzed interview data from three parents to examine how they conceptualize the relationship between language and mathematics, and how these conceptualizations shape the ways they support their children’s mathematics learning. The resulting research poems reveal tensions in participants’ views of mathematics and language. For example, mathematics was at times positioned as detachable from language, although language was simultaneously described as a potential barrier to mathematical success. In turn, parental involvement was characterized by support toward monitoring linguistic markers, relearning pedagogical methods, and rehearsing procedures. By centring parents’ perspectives, this study contributes to research on multilingual mathematics education by illustrating how parental conceptualizations may play a role in shaping mathematics practices across home and school spaces. Methodologically, the study suggests that research poetry has analytic potential for surfacing tensions in parental sense-making that may remain overlooked in more conventional qualitative analyses. This study points to a need for resources and communication practices that support dialogue between schools and families about the relationship between language and mathematics in FI contexts. Full article

The scope of this research is to contribute, through qualitative bases and case studies, to the relevance of old and new materialities in the process of rural change and restructuring in remote rural areas. The research on rural materialities can be found in cultural studies of heritage, modern geographical history and postmodern rural geography, based on post-structural and Deleuzian geographies, mainly geographies of heterogeneous associations and experimental and vibrant materiality. Geographic materialities allow multiple approaches in rural geography. A first approximation allows us to distinguish between old and new materialities. In each old and new category, it is possible to use different approaches: qualities of place, more-than-human, rural change, assemblage theory, material design, emotional geographies and cultural heritage. The sustainability-related outcomes are the rural material styles reviewed. Styles of research on old materialism are based on (1) qualities on place, (2) heritage and its effects in place, and (3) rural restructuring. The new change in the conceptualization of the material world is based on reconstructed local materialism and dissolved traditional rural communities. The styles in new rural materialities in the rural geographical field are (1) rural restructuring processes and new materialities, (2) material values and sophisticated visions of the countryside, (3) ensembles and material lives, and (4) emotional negotiations and feelings. Full article

In Türkiye, where agriculture consumes 75% of available water and national irrigation efficiency is only 51.3%, irrigation modernization—the conversion of classical open-channel irrigation systems to pressurized pipe systems—presents a primary strategy to achieve significant water savings. This study provides a comprehensive economic assessment of the potential of this strategy. A twofold methodology was employed: first, a cost–benefit analysis (CBA) of the 36,108 ha Ivriz irrigation project, and second, a national model to simulate the economic impact of modernizing nation’s 4.9 million hectares currently irrigated by such classical systems. This approach directly addresses two gaps identified in the literature: the lack of comprehensive project-level economic assessments of full irrigation modernization in large-scale open-channel systems, and the absence of simulations quantifying the national-level economic potential of modernizing Türkiye’s classical irrigation infrastructure. The Ivriz case study reveals that project viability is entirely contingent on the on-farm efficiency achieved post-modernization. At 60% efficiency, water savings are insufficient to make the project economically feasible, whereas at 90% efficiency, substantial water savings render the project highly profitable. At the national level, the analysis indicates that the conserved water could be used to expand Türkiye’s irrigated area by 1.77–2.98 million hectares, generating an additional $3.47–$5.84 billion in annual agricultural income. The findings conclude that while modernization represents a powerful investment, its success requires a comprehensive policy framework that not only funds infrastructure conversion but also mandates integrated support programs to ensure farmers adopt the high-efficiency technologies needed to achieve these savings. Full article

This essay examines six depictions of the 1898 suicide of New Zealand businessman and politician William Larnach: four historical narratives and two dramatic/fictional depictions. Drawing on the insights of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White, I argue that these tellings reflect an increasing influence of the Hippolytus myth, a culturally authorized narrative rooted in traditional British colonial education structures and Antipodean reception of classics. In particular, as New Zealand shifted away from British identification to a distinctly Kiwi identity, classics legitimized New Zealand culture within a global north from which the Antipodean nation is geographically isolated. Analyzing depictions of Larnach’s death and the possible incestuous scandal leading up to it reveals important historiographic insights both into how history is conceptualized and emplotted and into how Antipodean cultures navigate their positions on the fringes of a larger global north primarily seated in Europe and North America. Full article

Daoist female alchemy (nüdan 女丹) texts articulate a bodily paradigm in which humans and nature mutually enfold one another, and in which yin and yang interact in harmonious complementarity. Through an analysis of three key dimensions, the yin-yang cosmology embedded in these texts, the ways menstruation, desire, and the female breasts are reconceived in the course of cultivation, and the ideal of gestating an a priori (xiantian 先天) embryo, this article argues that nüdan writings present a gender-symmetrical, pre-sexual symbolic culture. This culture both acknowledges gender difference and ultimately transcends it, seeking a return to the undifferentiated, yin-yang combined condition of primordial Dao. These texts reveal that women and men possess complementary yin and yang attributes that must be reintegrated in order to return to the a priori state and attain infinite vitality. They likewise suggest that both women and men harbor active, originary desire, and that only through equivalent processes of bodily transformation, reverting the sexualized, adult bodies into the unsexualized bodies of the girl and boy, can practitioners acquire the power to gestate the inner elixir, symbolizing inexhaustible vitality. In this sense, nüdan writings develop a pre-sexual narrative centered on vitality, offering a resonant response to concerns within postmodern feminism regarding how to dismantle centralized, phallogocentric narratives while enriching non-gender-centralized symbolic cultures. They thus provide a special path to reconsider gender not by advancing forward, but by stepping back into a more primordial, integrated ideal. Full article

In this article, the philosophical (critical) continuity between ancient Greek skepticism (Pyrrhonism) and postmodern political theory is pointed out. This continuity (philosophical reincarnation) is demonstrated by referring to Sextus Empiricus’ writings on Pyrrhonism, as well as two different approaches that are considered to reflect postmodern political theory in its most salient features, such as anti-fundamentalism: Chantal Mouffe’s “project of radical democracy” and the “art of doubt” in Ulrich Beck’s “reflexive” modernity. The content of the identified continuity is basically the following: Just as the Pyrrhonian philosopher aspires to achieve serenity of spirit by suspending judgment through doubt (“epoche” and “ataraksia”) [epəkē –αταραξία], the postmodern theorist aims to end organized political violence by doubting all modern truth allegations. In other words, the individual hope of the Pyrrhonian philosopher is reproduced in the postmodern mind as a socio-political ideal. In Michel Foucault’s terms, the “regime of truth” or the “politics of truth” is an option that often leads to the “terror of truth”. The politics of doubt, on the other hand, is a peaceful, tolerant alternative. According to the postmodern theorist, skepticism is a highly strategic element of a pluralist (libertarian) democratic order. The intellectual way to make modern democracy even more democratic is, first and foremost, through a skepticism that makes absolutely no concessions to truth allegations. In this respect, the most uncompromising skeptic in the history of philosophy is the Pyrrhonian philosopher. Pyrrhonism is the summit of anti-dogmatism. This means that the postmodern theorist is not so much a postmodern agent. In other words, postmodern political theory is the theory of an innovation that is already obsolete. Full article

Since its emergence two decades ago, podcasting has spurred a rapidly evolving body of scholarship examining its social, technological, political, and cultural impact. However, much of podcast theory relies on analytical frameworks derived from other media. Moving beyond the binary debate that positions podcasting either as a wholly unique medium or merely an extension of radio, this article proposes a podcast-specific theoretical framework that advances a third approach within podcast studies. Rather than treating these perspectives as mutually exclusive, this approach synthesizes their strengths, recognizing podcasting’s broad esthetic range and time-shifted consumption patterns alongside its narrative lineage in radio drama and longform storytelling. In doing so, it situates podcasting within the genealogy of longform documentary journalism, aligning it with the evolving structures of digital publishing. At the intersection of podcast and journalism studies, this historically informed paradigm foregrounds three defining characteristics of podcast journalism: intimacy (manifested in personal narratives and parasocial relationships), reflexivity (evident in metajournalistic transparency and postmodern approaches to evidence), and democracy (leveraging progressive inclusivity or its oppositional countercurrents). While these features may be adapted or subverted across different productions, they remain core conventions that distinguish podcast journalism as a unique form of narrative digital media. Full article