scholarly journals Transparent Substance in a Transnational Existence: Materiality, Migration, Memory, and Gender—The Case of Israeli Artist Alina Rom Cohen

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Tal Dekel

This article discusses the art of Alina Rome Cohen, a woman artist from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel. Her glass sculptures highlight her hyphenated, multilayered, and dynamic identity, illustrating identity construction processes of migrant women under conditions of uprooting and re-grounding in the globalized era of transnationalism. The discussion feeds from theories influenced by “the material turn”, suggesting that artifacts “speak”. I will therefore argue that the material—glass—is involved in the active discussion and negotiation of power relations within society. Framed through Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art, first introduced in his book titled Art and Agency from 1998, this approach proposes a horizon of agency for the artworks themselves, which function in the world alongside other actants operating in the field, such as human beings. This article will analyze Rom Chohen’s artworks and will be informed by cultural theories from migration studies and gender studies, in order to ask new questions about the dynamics of the exclusion and inclusion of migrants under the ethno-national state of Israel, while offering alternative ways by which to think of concepts such as memory and time, as past and present are brought to a simultaneity.

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156
Author(s):  
Mediel Hove

This article evaluates the emergence of the new Cold War using the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts, among others. Incompatible interests between the United States (US) and Russia, short of open conflict, increased after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This article argues that the struggle for dominance between the two superpowers, both in speeches and deed, to a greater degree resembles what the world once witnessed before the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991. It asserts that despite the US’ unfettered power, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is now being checked by Russia in a Cold War fashion.


Author(s):  
S. Nazrul Islam

Chapter 4 provides a few case studies of rivers to illustrate the consequences of the Commercial approach. These rivers are: the Colorado River of the United States; the Murray-Darling river system of Australia; the Amu Darya and Syr Darya of the former Soviet Union; the Nile River of Africa; and the Indus River of South Asia. It shows that in each case, the application of the Commercial approach has led to river fragmentation and excessive withdrawal of water, leading to exhaustion of rivers, which in turn led to salinity intrusion and erosion, subsidence, and desiccation of the deltas. The ecology of the river basins has been damaged, including loss of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. In case of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers, this damage includes the destruction of the Aral Sea, once considered the second-largest inland waterbody of the world. In each case, the Commercial approach has led to conflicts among co-riparian countries.


Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.


1991 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 233-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Thompson

In a recent report by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, “Education in U.S. Schools of International Affairs,” Princeton's former president Robert F. Goheen presents several crucial factors in the apparent decline of international studies in the U.S. The private sector, which at first demanded broadly-educated professionals, have recently shown little enthusiasm for students of international affairs. This has resulted in lack of funding and lack of interest in the field of international studies. This is paradoxical primarily because the students of international affairs undergo a multidiscplinary curriculum, facilitating their adaptation to practically any field of work following graduation, contrary to those students who have chosen a strict and narrow profession. Unfortunately, much of the fault, according to the report lies with the universities and the graduates themselves, who fail to articulate properly their comparative essential advantage in the broad field of their education. Thompson expounds on a more serious ramification of the decline in interest in international studies: the imminent failure to foresee future international crises. As the case of Iraq's growing power in the Middle East has demonstrated, the U.S. looked the other way, toward the developments in the former Soviet Union, and was not able to act in time to circumvent Iraq's aggression. With the world looking to the U.S. for strategic leadership in ethics and power, Americans cannot afford to deny American youth a strong foundation and education in international studies.


Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Patico

The rise of the international matchmaking industry has been particularly rapid and noticeable in the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War has intersected with daily socioeconomic pressures to make cross-cultural romance and marriage newly possible and newly desirable for some women of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. Less acknowledged than the role of economics in women's decision making, however, is the fact that postsocialist financial strains are not experienced in social vacuums but are mediated by ideals of gender and marriage, such that the search for a foreign spouse is unlikely to be experienced as a simple desire for increased material comfort. Instead, discourses of gender “crisis” in the home country inform the desires for transnational kinship for both women from the former Soviet Union and men from the United States. When both women's and men's narratives of “crisis” (and how transnational marriage might alleviate it) are taken into account, they significantly complicate our understandings of east-west relations of “commodification” and power.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Gewinner ◽  
Stefania Salvino

This study deals with meanings of economic insecurity for post-Soviet migrant women in Germany, Italy, and Spain, elaborating on its cultural underpinnings. Drawing upon several data sources, including interviews, observation, and online data, as well as judicial material, this study addresses the ways women from the former Soviet Union experience economic insecurity and which strategies they develop to cope. We consider women's age, social background, and level of education, analyzing their embeddedness into different life domains. We identify four patterns of coping with economic insecurity, linked to individual characteristics, cultural values and legal frame conditions in the countries under investigation, and provide implications for social mobility and conservative backlash in Europe.


2017 ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Pavlo Pavlenko

If Western Protestants and Neoprotestants preaching about “universal Christian brotherhood”, thus are carriers of postmodern global culture, come forward as propagandists of Westernization of the world, missionaries from countries, socalled “near abroad” uniting at different sorts Eurasian institutes, seminaries, unions, missions, services, conferences, associations orientated ion supporting links at the former Soviet Union and consequently on development of Russian empire — Russia as Eurasia, “Russia-Eurasia”. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Yu. Kapitonova ◽  
Sergey P. Gupalo ◽  
Sergey S. Dydykin ◽  
Yury L. Vasil’ev ◽  
Viktor B. Mandrikov ◽  
...  

In the 60s of the last century, a number of new universities in the world began to apply an integrated program of medical education, the cornerstone of which was problem-oriented education. Thus, the Flexner model of higher education adopted by that time in most countries of the world, with its characteristic segregation of teaching of the theoretical and clinical disciplines, which had ceased to satisfy the needs of modern healthcare, was gradually replaced by a new system that put the student in the center of the educational process and opened the way to active methods of teaching being focused on the end result – training of graduates whose qualifications most fully satisfy the needs of society. Over the half-century history of its existence, this system has been adopted by most medical universities in different countries of the world, in many of which it has undergone significant modifications in accordance with the needs of national educational standards. Many medical universities in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union showed interest in this system, some of the medical faculties of our country accepted certain elements of it. However, up to date no integrated preclinical medical education program has been applied in any of the Russian universities. Hereby we are undertaking an attempt to analyze the reasons and assess the possible perspectives for the transition of medical universities in Russia to teaching of fundamental and biomedical disciplines using the integrated curriculum.


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