The relationship between the sociological categories of race, ethnicity, and nation, and indeed definitions of these terms themselves, continues to be a lively, if not fraught, topic. One of the first social scientists to engage in the investigation of these concepts was Max Weber (1864–1920). Though his work on the subject was incomplete at the time of his death, it nevertheless provided a useful starting point for later research. One of the recent scholars whose work echoes that of Weber was Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016). Through an analysis of the work of both on the subjects of race, ethnicity, and national identity, this paper will examine the similarities in the approaches of Weber and Smith and, in the process, suggest ways to continue the exploration of these important concepts.
This study critically examines the state of Indigenous education in Taiwan through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates policy analysis, statistical evaluation, and localized case studies. Despite the implementation of progressive legislation, Indigenous students continue to encounter persistent disparities in both secondary and tertiary education. By drawing on national datasets and school-level examples, this paper uncovers systemic mismatches between mainstream educational practices and the linguistic, cultural, and communal realities of Indigenous populations. To contextualize Taiwan’s challenges, this study includes a comparative analysis with Indigenous education in Canada, highlighting both shared obstacles and divergent strategies. The findings indicate that, despite policy reforms and targeted programs in both nations, entrenched inequalities endure, rooted in colonial legacies, insufficient cultural integration, and a lack of community-driven educational initiatives. The article argues for a transformative shift in Taiwan’s education system: one that emphasizes the indigenization of curricula, the inclusion of Indigenous voices in educational policymaking, and greater investment in culturally responsive support mechanisms, particularly at the high school and university levels. In summary, meaningful improvement in Indigenous education requires moving from an assimilationist paradigm to one rooted in cultural respect and self-determination.
Over the last decade, Cameroon has been embroiled in a violent civil conflict. In 2016, protests within the minority Anglophone regions against the obligatory use of French in schools triggered a period of considerable unrest, in which hundreds of people have been incarcerated and killed. Following an increased security presence in the English-speaking regions, armed groups surfaced calling for secession—the creation of an independent nation of Ambazonia. The failure to resolve the crisis peacefully through dialogue has resulted in a spiral of violence between armed separatists and the military. Building on the work of Frantz Fanon, this paper offers an analysis of the construction of these identities before and after European colonisation. In mapping the contours of Francophone and Anglophone assimilation it seeks to explore how the current crisis might be resolved through what Fanon describes as a transformation of the collective unconscious and what the Nigerian philosopher Cyril Orji describes as a psychological transition away from prejudice against the Other.
Васильев Александр Александрович, Радюш Олег Александрович
Представлен комплексный анализ двух ключевых находок из кургана 21 могильника Валовый (Ростовская обл.), исследованного экспедицией Азовского музея в 1987 г. под руководством Е.И. Беспалого – серебряной поясной пряжки и литого крестовидного латунного предмета. Пряжка, отличающаяся гранёной овальной рамкой, прямоугольным щитком и фасеточным декором, соотнесена с типом П8 по В.Ю. Малашеву и датируется концом III – началом IV в. Для сравнительно-типологического анализа привлечены многочисленные аналогии из Крыма и Западной Европы. Крестовидный бронзовый предмет трактуется как возможная локальная эрзац-шпора: монолитная форма, отсутствие традиционного изгиба и наличие трёх шипов сближает её с кругом эмалевых литых шпор лесостепной и степной зоны Восточной Европы, но скорее демонстрирует местные ремесленные черты. Рассмотрена связь конструкции с римскими традициями шпор на ремешках-обоймах что позволяет выявить процессы локальной адаптации престижных форм кавалерийского снаряжения в сарматской и смежных средах. Оба предмета служат важными источниками для изучения хронологии, ремесленных связей и культурной динамики III–IV вв. в регионе, демонстрируя локальные версии престижных форм и активное проникновение западных и северных ремесленных традиций в позднесарматскую культуру.
Dementia disrupts communication not only as a cognitive process but as a relational practice, leaving people living with dementia (PLwD) at risk of exclusion when language fragments. This study examines how communication closeness, the felt sense of being understood, emotionally attuned, and socially connected, might be supported through Research in and through Design (Ri&tD). Drawing on formative mixed-reality studies and a participatory co-design workshop with PLwD, caregivers, and stakeholders, we iteratively developed a series of playful artifacts culminating in Neighbourly, a tactile board game designed to support relational interaction through rule-based, multimodal play. Across this design genealogy, prototypes were treated as Living Counter-Maps: participatory mappings that made patterns of gesture, rhythm, shared attention, and material engagement visible and discussable. Through iterative interpretation and synthesis, the study identifies three guiding principles for designing for communication closeness: supporting co-regulation rather than correction, enabling multimodal reciprocity, and providing a shared material focus for joint agency. The paper consolidates these insights in the Living Counter-Maps Framework, which integrates counter-mapping and Ri&tD as a methodological approach for studying and designing relational communication in dementia care.
Statues and monuments are permanent forms of commemoration that interpret and reconstruct public memory in colonial settler societies. Representation through memorialisation is attributed to a genealogy of Western collective remembering that reflects the values, narratives, and experiences of the dominant settler population. Yet, collective remembering and memory can change. This article reports on Indigenous collective remembering practices that were observed in a local government intervention in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Boulcott Memorial Research Project sought iwi Māori (Indigenous Māori tribes) perspectives of the battle of Boulcott’s Farm to change a one-sided colonial memorial that was erected to honour British militia who died in the conflict. Iwi kaipūrākau (representatives) from Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Rangatahi, Ngāti Hāua, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira relayed their perspective of the battle through wānanga (a Māori oral tradition). In wānanga, kaipūrākau were perceived to remember relationally, outside colonial time, and through contemporary concerns and political interests, to advance tribal autonomy and self-determination. In this paper, I show how collective remembering in wānanga offers an anti-colonial ethic and intervention for building commemorative landscapes that can redirect public remembrance beyond the limitations of settler colonial memory and towards perspectives that are in tune with Indigenous peoples’ lived realities.
The desire of Gukurahundi survivors for cultural platforms that enable them to discuss, mourn, and commemorate their loved ones is now very loud in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland and Midlands provinces. While community-based organisations have provided platforms for Gukurahundi survivors, the children of survivors, and academics to interface and interact, the government’s gatekeeping processes remain a challenge for the community-wide memorialisation and documentation of the genocide. In this conceptual paper, I frame Gukurahundi as a meteorological event within a general Zimbabwean cultural context, foregrounding the desecration of the Ndebele people’s cultural practices, rituals, and ceremonies. Drawing from the documented legacies of this cultural violence within Matabeleland and south-western parts of the Midlands, through videos and the literature, I argue that this cultural violence resulted in the silencing of the remembrance of Gukurahundi, which remains critical to the resolution of the stand-off between the ZANU-PF government and the communities. In this paper, I further argue that this ecological symbolism provided a justification and legitimated direct brutal violence on presumed ZAPU and ex-ZPRA veterans who were largely Ndebele-speaking or of ethnic descent. Finally, I argue that it is not that the absence of alternative narratives but the sociopolitical and cultural environment that constrains these from being available and implemented.
В статье сопоставляется лепная глиняная посуда кухонного назначения с поселений V–III вв. до н.э., расположенных в лесостепной части бассейна р. Дон и относящихся к городецкой и скифоидной культурам. Анализируемая выборка включает 25 городецких горшков и 107 скифоидных. Проведено компьютеризированное сравнение их масштабированных к единой высоте профилировок, определены коэффициенты сходства форм. Установлено, что 22 городецких сосуда (88 % от числа рассмотренных) подобны 69 скифоидным (64 %). Коэффициент их сходства составляет от 95 до 98 %. Это результат заимствования городецкими гончарами форм посуды у соседей по региону. Оно, скорее всего, было следствием хозяйственных контактов – о неразвитости процессов этнической миксации свидетельствует ограниченный ассортимент городецкой посуды, в которой не получила распространения столовая утварь. Пять горшков, чьи профилировки или пропорции не вполне соответствуют скифоидным, возможно, изготавливались в период адаптации городецких гончаров. Влияние скифоидных гончарных традиций прослежено и в технологии изготовления керамики. Сопоставлены данные о составе искусственных добавок в формовочных массах 80 городецких и 108 скифоидных фрагментов, полученные по результатам петрографического анализа. Обе группы донской керамики характеризуется сходными рецептурами составления формовочных масс, среди которых преобладали многокомпонентные. Отмечено восемь совпадений состава искусственных примесей при двух малозначимых отклонениях. Распространение одинаковых рецептов свидетельствует, очевидно, о смешивании разных технологических схем в результате родственных связей их носителей. Керамические материалы во взаимодействии двух групп оседлого населения донской лесостепи отражают доминирующую роль более развитой в социально-экономическом отношении. Однако они не дают оснований усомниться в этнокультурной специфике обитателей городецких поселений.
In responding to the call for exploring and explicating aspects of the research process that remain unspoken about in most social science fields, this narrative asks deceptively simple questions: what does it mean to carry out research as an academic with a lived experience of displacement, loss and pain? What are the methodological choices available to me as a migrant scholar? What does it really mean to write (about) the displaced-turned-emplaced self from the margin—myself being a case in point—within contexts of loss and displacement? My aim is to present a personal narrative that is uniquely mine, a story that may work with or against what is thought to be the official story. I defend the use of fragments, theoretically and methodologically, to avoid the homogenisation of narratives and assumptions about how research is carried out, how knowledge(s) are produced and reproduced, and who has the power to produce them. Thus, building on established scholarship cutting across various fields and guided by postcolonial and postmodernist theories, I hope to unpack the tensions and possibilities inherent in thinking about borders and positionality in academia (when the researcher dwells at the margins), identity, its fragmentation, and its entanglement with questions of decoloniality, narrative and voice.
This work investigates my family’s long-held secrets that concealed the whereabouts of my grandmother. After years of estrangement, my father discovered Ada living in a mental hospital. Memories are rarely straightforward and could only take us so far in understanding why Ada remained missing from our family for so long. My search for answers involved genealogical research and led me to access Ada’s mental patient files. This rich data source provided some troubling glimpses into Ada’s auditory hallucinations and grandiose delusions and her encounters with several mental institutions in Victoria, Australia, during the twentieth century. Critical family history approaches allow me to gain insights into the gendered power relations within her marriage and the power imbalance within families. The theme of migration is addressed through the lens of mobility when Ada relocated following her marriage and her movement between home on trial leave and several sites of care after her committal. Scholars have shown that the themes of migration and mobility are important and hold personal significance in exploring the connection between mental health and institutionalisation for our family. Here, I demonstrate how mental illness in families is stigmatised and concealed through institutionalisation and its legacy for younger generations.
This essay documents my three-decade-long journey of connections and resultant transformations between scholarly knowledge and artistic production in my work. In reinvestigating my history with stage and visual arts, I trace the relationship between traditionally ‘alien’ practices and academic understandings of societal and political mass violence and invite the reader to reconsider what academia stands for in order to engage with borderless histories of conflict, violence, and displacement. This essay dwells on how artistic engagement is both a personal and a profoundly political process through which the experience of violence is communicated through thoughts, emotions, hopes, and expressions of trauma. There are also significant ethical concerns present concerning the portrayal of violence, death, and suffering, which the paper discusses under the aegis of ethics of witnessing as responsibility.
In this article, we design a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, showing its positioning within the growing field of “contemporary spiritualities”, their premodern, esoteric and theosophical roots and Catholicism. Our main claim is that yoga and contemporary spiritualities as practiced in XXI-century Italy are neither entirely new nor are they clearly an alternative to more established religions. We rely on the methods and tools of a “discursive study of religion” approach to unpack the intricacies, genealogical roots and definitional boundaries that yoga, contemporary spiritualities and religion in Italy share. More specifically, we question the novelty of contemporary spiritualities in Italy, unveiling some of their esoteric, theosophical and anthroposophical roots, presenting, in turn, a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, discussing its positioning amid Catholicism and contemporary spiritualities. We conclude by reflecting on the creation, use and limits of sociocultural theorizing about interpreting and understanding the spiritual and religious field, with a specific emphasis on the overlapping and porous boundaries between the concepts of religion, contemporary spiritualities, Western esotericism and modern yoga.
The rise in recognition of children’s agency—that is, their status as inalienable right-bearing actors—has been a welcome change in international organizations, albeit often through a set of media activities that depict children variously as victims or beneficiaries of moral leadership. Typically, a handful of children/youth affected directly by a particular tragedy become the recognizable faces of identified human rights abuses. This research explores media representation of children born of war in Bosnia, “invisible” children who only recently were legally categorized as victims of war. As children who were born of wartime rape, the lives of select young activists have been documented through movies and media interviews since their childhood. This paper explores the costs of such disclosure and performativity, and sacrifices that young activists make to expose their “truth” to gain recognition of their attendant rights. It ultimately highlights the tension between the search for the rights of affected children and the dilemmas inherent in the actions of the few youth activists who publicly embrace the conditions of their birth to bring voice to others.
Family history research has seen a surge in popularity in recent years; however, is this preoccupation with who we are and where we come from new? Archaeological evidence suggests that ancestors played crucial and ubiquitous roles in the identities and cosmologies of past societies. This paper will explore how, in the absence of genealogical websites and DNA testing, kinship structures and understandings of personhood beyond genealogy may have influenced concepts of ancestry. Case studies from later prehistoric Britain will demonstrate the ways in which monuments, objects and human remains themselves created bonds between the living and the dead, prompting us to reflect on genealogy as just one aspect of our identity in the present.
Evidence suggests Colombia’s transnational adoption program maintained systemic problematic practices, some of which were illicit in nature. Examples include child and birthmother trafficking, sale of children, and falsifying or omitting information in adoption documentation. Transnationally adopted Colombian adults encounter significant barriers to accessing their right to know their origins and identity. Despite this, some adult Colombian adoptees are successful in searching for and engaging in birth family reunions. Our study conducted a secondary analysis of an original study on Colombian birth family reunion experiences. We asked the research question, “What discrepancies exist in Colombian transnational adoption narratives?” to perform a directed qualitative content analysis of 17 participant interviews. We found nearly half of our participants reported an illicit practice categorized as child for sale, birthmother trafficking, and abuse of process. Findings underscore the legacy and impact of harmful adoption practices on current adult Colombian transnational adoptees seeking their human right to identity.
This article presents an attempt to analyse historical politics as politics of memory in modern Georgia in the context of perception of the images and heritage of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG). The aim of the study is to analyse the images of the Democratic Republic of Georgia between 2018 and 2020 as part of the history and genealogy of the modern project of Georgian statehood in historical politics. The article is based on the methods used in studies of the politics of memory (historical politics) in modern interdisciplinary historiography. The article describes the features of the instrumentalisation of DRG images in the historical and political cultures of Georgia. The article examines the forms of participation of modern elites in the politics of memory in contexts of jubilee celebrations, memorial, and commemorative events that inspired the actualisation of the DRG images in the cultural and public spaces of Georgia. It is revealed that modern elites and heirs of DRG politicians became actors of historical politics and actual “battles for history”. As a result, the author concludes that images of the DRG became a symbolic resource for the consolidation of society and the development of the political identity of Georgian statehood. It is assumed that images of the DRG are integrated into the symbolic tools that political elites used in their attempts to correct identity and historical memory in modern Georgia. It is demonstrated that by initiating memorial celebrations dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the DRG in 2018, Georgian elites launched a series of commemorative events planned until 2024 solving political problems, localising, and interpreting historical traumas in the politics of memory proposed by the state as the main former of the official historical canon.
History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature
Uiyeokju Palsebo is a genealogy record that contains the eighth generation of patrilineal ancestors, maternal grandfathers, and fathers-in-law of technical officials who worked in three fields: medicine, linguistics, and mathematics. This book covers members of influential families who monopolized the positions of technical officers. In that respect, it seems to have had an effect like a kind of 'white list'. This paper identifies the range of families based on common ancestors above eight generations according to the editing method of this book, attempting various statistical analysis. The results of the analysis shows that it is possible to determine the size of the medical families, which varied according to the number of medical bureaucrats and the distance of kinship between them. Most of the families had workers in the three fields of medicine, linguistics, and mathematics, but there were also ‘families more specialized in medicine’ that produced a large number of medical figures. The ancestors of medical figures were mainly engaged in the three fields of medicine, linguistics, and mathematics, but there were also a small number of officials in charge of “unhak(including astronomy, geography, and fortune-telling),” law, art, and transcription. For distant ancestors from common ancestors to the fifth generation, the proportion of technical officers was small, but for relatively close ancestors, the proportion of technical officers, especially medical officers, increased. It can be seen that the status as a medical officer tends to be hereditary further down the generations. The fields of activity of the maternal grandfathers and fathers-in-law of medical figures were more concentrated in the medical field. This can be the result of confirming the influence of the marital relationship network that was formed in the close period with the medical persons being investigated. In this paper, only medical figures were considered as primary research subjects, but their macroscopic networks were relatively evenly spread out in the three fields of medicine, linguistics, and mathematics. In this network, Uiyeokju Palsebo contained homogeneous hierarchies that could continuously dominate a specific field of government office.
Diana Bellessi's essay production, as well as her translation work, fosters the creation of a genealogy for Argentine poetry written by women, at the center of a tradition in which she inscribes herself as a poet. Her essays constitute critical interventions that propose other ways of conceiving literary history, in a reading movement that looks towards the past, in search of the predecessors, towards the present, in listening to the little voice of the poem, and towards the future, in dialogue with the poets and readers that make up her “lineage and family” (La pequeña 105).
Latin America. Spanish America, French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature