Sorry Not Sorry: (Non-) Apology, Satire, and the Vacuum

This essay considers the theme of apology and what happens when the demand for apology is subverted, using the Vacuum newspaper as a case study. I consider the argument that played out in 2004 between the Vacuum and Belfast City Council, which partially funded its production. The Vacuum’s publication of themed double issues entitled ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ provoked the ire of conservative Council Members who proposed that the publication's editors must apologize to Members of the Council and the citizens of Belfast for the offence they had caused. In so doing, the publication secured its place as one of the most controversial Northern Irish print publications of recent years. In their response to the Council’s demand – a themed ‘Sorry’ issue – the Vacuum’s editors struck a defiant tone. Media discourse around the ‘Sorry’ issue of the Vacuum has centred on the element of public spectacle it generated, but this essay represents a reconsideration of its importance. I read it as informed by an ethics of resistance. By refusing to be co-opted into making a sham apology, the ‘Sorry’ issue illuminates the crucial importance of apology in the place and time of its production – in a country still reeling from the violence of the Troubles.

An Analysis of the Change in the Attitudes and Behaviors of Users before and after the Pandemic: Case Study; Ankara Çubuk-1 Dam

During the pandemic process that has been going on for more than a year since the pandemic period was declared in 2020, the troubles and restrictions faced by people negatively affect the morale motivation of people. In this study, the definition of recreation areas, which are the leading places where people feel happy and peaceful, has been defined, what they contain is mentioned, and the adequacy of the recreational areas has been discussed in the survey and it has been determined that they are one of the most important needs in the cities. In the example of the recreation area of Çubuk-1 dam, it was investigated whether there is a change in the attitudes and behaviors of people before and after the pandemic, not face to face due to the pandemic, but through a voluntary survey based on social media. Although individuals thought that it was crowded after the pandemic, they preferred to use the recreation area of Çubuk-1 dam by paying attention to mask, distance and hygiene rules. The positive effects of physical activity, socialization, and outdoor travel on health are generally accepted by individuals. During the pandemic process, it has been observed that people have changed the way they spend their free time and the places they want to be, as they are overwhelmed by staying in their homes due to the prohibitions. The psychological and physical positive effects of recreation areas on human health and the changes caused by the pandemic in people's attitudes and behaviors paralleled the responses of the participants to the questionnaire.

Northern Soulscapes: Writing through Brexit in the work of Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham and Dara McAnulty

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.

‘The Troubles' and the peace process in Northern Irelanda in Seamus Heaney’s "The cure at Troy"

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.

LOGIC AND POETRY: THE CONTIGUITY OF THE CREATIVE WORLDS OF N. A. VASILIEV IN THE BACKGROUND OF LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES

The complexity of the structure and the varieties of the shades of the theme of the relationship between scientific and artistic creativity presented by us in the article the amazing “destiny of ideas” within the framework of modern – non-classical (non-aristotelian) logic. Nikolai Alexandrovich Vasiliev (1880-1940) was a versatile personality, but two aspects of his work deserve special attention – the poetry in the style of symbolism, which he was engaged in his youth, and the logical studies that allow him to be considered one of the founders of non-classical logic. Despite the difference in the degree of significance of the N. Vasiliev’s poetic and logical heritage, it is easy to see that it is in the poetry that the future logical ideas are first formed. The otherworld, the imaginary worlds are a characteristic feature of the poetry of symbolism. The creative collision of N. Vasiliev lies in the fact that in his case the poet anticipates logician. In the article “Logic and Metalogic” he declares that the classical (aristotelian) logic is not the only one, that the types of reasoning and argumentation, that is, the logical systems depend on the different preconditions. These preconditions are associated with those diverse worlds, with those different realities on which the reasoning is superimposed. The cognitive construct playing the role of “reality” loses its the status of the invariant for various logics, it can vary, which does not mean the loss of the unity of the foundations of rationality, on the contrary, it is the acquisition of the arsenal of the intellectual tools with rich possibilities for constructing a variety of rational interpretations. The life of N. Vasiliev turned out to be full of the unfinished projects, the troubles, because of its inconsistency, it looks tragic. But it was the logical ideas ahead of their time, among which the idea of the possibility strictly logically, and therefore non-contradictory to think contradictory worlds, gave N. Vasiliev the “registrate in eternity”.

‘The troubles of collecting’: William Henry Harvey and the practicalities of natural-history collecting in Britain's nineteenth-century world

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the logistical challenges and difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory. This article builds on this trend by looking beyond apparent successes to consider the practices and practicalities of shipboard travel and maritime and coastal collecting activities. The discussion focuses on the example of William Henry Harvey, who travelled to Australia in pursuit of cryptogams – non-flowering plants like mosses, lichens and algae – in 1853. In his private correspondence to family and friends, Harvey offered insights into the challenges and obstacles faced by all collectors in the period. His experiences were fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge and physical constraints he encountered on the way. On one level, shipboard and onshore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain's global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting. The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.

PRESCHOOL EDUCATION TEACHERS’ EVALUATIONS ABOUT THE PROBLEMS EXPERIENCED IN THE EDUCATION PROCESS AND THEIR SOURCES

The aim of this research is to reveal the evaluations of preschool teachers’ about the problems experienced in the education process and the sources of the problems. The study was carried out based on the basic qualitative research design. The research participants consist of 19 preschool teachers working in public and private schools providing preschool education in Eskişehir city center. The primary data of the research were obtained through semi-structured interviews with teachers. In addition, the parent demographic information collection forms and the researcher diaries were used. Descriptive analysis and content analysis were used in the analysis of the data. According to the main findings obtained within the scope of the research, the most frequent and common problems experienced by students in the education process are related to attention and maintaining attention, and exhibiting behaviors in accordance with the rules in the classroom. In addition, the problems experienced are observed much more intensely in male students compared to female students. When teachers compare their students from past years with their current students, they are of the opinion that there is a significant increase in the problems experienced in the education process compared to years. Problems experienced in the preschool education process occur more frequently and are more common in public schools compared to private preschool education institutions. The most important sources of problems behind the troubles that arise in the education process; students’ parents, common technology usage habits of students, quality of teachers, quality of educational environments, preschool education program, student characteristics and changing daily life habits of students.

“Brought up to Live Double Lives”: Intelligence and Espionage as Literary and Philosophical Figures in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place and For All We Know

The article examines the figure of the spy—alongside themes related to espionage—as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948–2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson’s later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of “oneself as another,” the article examines how Carson’s spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of “self-othering.” Carson employs the figure of the spy—who juggles identities by “donning” different clothes or languages—to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery. Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition.

Voivode of Saratov Prince Fyodor Petrovich Boryatinsky (1648–1650): Controversial pages of the biography

The article for the first time presents a detailed biography of the governor of Saratov, Prince Fyodor Petrovich Boryatinsky. This prince Rurikovich first distinguished himself in battles on the southern borders of the country in the final period of the Time of Troubles after the election of Mikhail Romanov as tsar. In the autumn of 1613, he freed Starodub from the supporters of the Polish prince Vladislav, participated in the campaign against Gomel, and then fought near Dorogobuzh, defended Moscow in 1618. After the Troubles, being already a Moscow nobleman, he served as a voivode in different cities for about 50 years - in the Siberian city of Tara, in the new fortress Atemar, in Saratov, Sevsk, Suzdal.