Reflection on Criticisms of Critical Geopolitics

The book Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space was first published twenty-five years ago. In this article, I briefly discuss the geopolitical and intellectual sources of inspiration for the development Critical Geopolitics as a distinctive approach within Anglo-American political geography. In doing so, I distinguish it from other concurrent critical approached to International Relations and the world-system within English-speaking Geography at this time. Thereafter I consider four lines of critique of Critical Geopolitics. The first is the argument that the approach is too political. A subsidiary argument considers its relationship to violence. The second is the argument that it is neglects embodiment and everyday life and that, consequently, a Feminist Geopolitics is needed as a necessary corrective. The third is that claim that the approach is too textual and operates with a flawed conception of discourse, one that neglects practice. The fourth critique is that Critical Geopolitics has an undeveloped conception of materiality and neglects more-than-human agency. In discuss these criticisms, I make an argument for a continuity of concern with latent catastrophism in Critical Geopolitics from the danger of nuclear war in the mid-nineteen eighties to the climate emergency of today.

Mapping paradigm shifts in the geography of innovation

The study quantifies important theoretical tendencies in the geography of innovation in a historical view based on a novel big-data approach. It shows that the field was “born” only in the nineteen eighties after long periods (i.e. the first half of the 20th century) of analysing economic growth and regional development without endogenising the production process of innovation. The paper presents important shifts in the basic assumptions of models with the increasing use of the terms “economic instability” or “asymmetric information” instead of “economic equilibrium” and “perfect information”. These mean a deviation from traditional neoclassical regional economics, which is reflected in the fact that “geography of innovation” gained the same level of popularity in the 2000s as “industrial geography”. The paper shows that although the decline of the Marshallian term “industrial district” stopped in parallel with the work of Becattini, a new innovation systems theory took over the relative frequency of mention of the industrial district by the turn of the new millennium.

Poem: The Nineteen Eighties

Poem

The Expanded Story From Transmedia as a Business Model

It is the creation of transmedia stories is that drives the business model and not the business model that drives the stories. In other words, the transmedia narrative is the means and not the end; it is the essential step for transmedia marketing. This chapter is centred on the study of the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-) as an example of the redefinition of a transmedia strategy without a truly transmedia story. The recent Netflix campaigns have managed to make the beginning of the second season of the show into a viral campaign in Spain, thanks to its connection to Spanish pop-culture personalities. The series relies on an obvious aesthetic; themes and narratives from the nineteen-eighties. This makes an intertextual analysis of the story interesting. In this chapter, we propose an analysis of marketing strategies as an expansion of the diegetic universe using various supports.

Posthumous Performance and Digital Resurrection: From Science Fiction to Startups

Technology enabling resurrection and reanimation of the dead has long been a theme in popular culture, and in science fiction (SF) in particular. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), generally considered the beginning of SF as a genre (Freedman, 2000), tells the tale of a scientist who harnesses technology and electricity to reanimate an entity stitched together from the remains of the recent dead. However, it is telling that Victor Frankenstein is now generally considered a metaphor for the arrogance of scientists who fail to consider the harmful potential of their work. While rarely as dramatic as stories of resurrection, Tony Walter (Walter, 2015) has convincingly argued that for thousands of years every communication technology, from etching in stone and cave paintings onward, has been used to communicate with the dead in some fashion. It comes as no surprise, then, that technology start-ups and entrepreneurs are attempting to harness digital technologies, social media, and networked communication not just to speak to the dead but also to use their digital residues to seemingly offer both resurrection and immortality.This chapter examines the promotional discourse deployed by three of these futuristic start-up companies – LivesOn (LivesOn, 2013), Eterni.me (“Eterni.me - Virtual Immortality,” 2016) and Humai (Humai, 2016) – and compares these with several notable SF texts which explore the underlying presumptions and broader cultural and social ramifications of these companies succeeding in achieving digital resurrection. The episode ‘Be Right Back’ of the dystopian television series Black Mirror (Harris, 2013) imagines a world where someone could be reconstituted from the detailed record of their lives left behind across various social media accounts, but with clear echoes of Frankenstein. The series returns to these themes in a more endearing fashion in the upbeat ‘San Junipero’ (Harris, 2016) which features a digital afterlife fashioned after the nineteen eighties. Australian hard SF author and computer scientist Greg Egan also explores this terrain in great detail; his short story ‘Learning to be Me’ (Egan, 1995) and novel Permutation City (Egan, 1994) reveal many of the philosophical presumptions and potential outcomes of a digitised afterlife (Leaver, 2004). In comparing these technology companies and SF texts, this chapter operates on two levels: the first, being to ask what presumptions are being made about contemporary personhood, culture and death; and secondly, mapping what future issues might the success of these start-ups actually provoke.

A REVIEW ON FAST DISSOLVING TABLET

In the present scientific scenario, the drug delivery technology has become extremely competitive and quickly evolving with ever-increasing demand. Fast dissolving tablet (FDT) is one such style of an innovative and distinctive drug delivery system. Once FDT is placed on the tongue, it disintegrates or dissolves quickly (in seconds) without chewing or water. Fast dissolving pills became well-liked because of higher patient compliance and most popular over typical capsules and tablets. Numerous FDT products entered the market in the nineteen eighties. This novel drug delivery like FDT or mouth dissolving tablet (MDT) has overcome several disadvantages like dysphagia or non-accessibility of water whereas travel. Compared with typical dosage form FDT is an alternative as well as helpful for the patient. The basic approach employed in the development of FDT is that the use of superdisintegrants like crosspovidone, croscarmellose sodium or maximizing pore structure within the formulation. This review article contains different techniques used for preparing FDT, silent features, numerous proprietary technologies, mechanism of super disintegration, and also the limitations.

Czynniki destabilizacji politycznej w Karaczajo-Czerkiesji: separatyzm etniczny i fundamentalizm religijny

The Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia is among the most unstable entities of the Russian federation. Whereas the ideas of radical political Islam enjoy little popularity there, the ethnic structure is exceptionally complex, which is not reflected in the model of territorial administration. The scale of corruption and nepotism of the local elite is enormous. The relations between the two titular ethnicities of Karachay-Cherkessia abound in mutual prejudices and distrust, or even hostility. The current model of a two-nationality republic is an element of the Soviet legacy, originally introduced in order to overcome ethnic particularism. The decline of the Soviet model of state fostered ethnic particularism and separatism, which applied to Karachays and Cherkessians alike at the turn of the nineteen-eighties. At present, Karachay separatism is a marginal phenomenon, while the influence of the Pan-Cherkessian movement has been consistently growing, posing an increasing threat to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. The author characterizes various dimensions of ethnic separatism in Karachay-Cherkessia and analyzes the reasons for the weakness of the armed Islamist underground in this Caucasian republic.

Death and the experience of dying in Magdalena Sokołowska’s research conceptions

One of the many research passions of Magdalena Sokołowska, regarded as the founder of Polish and cofounder of European medical sociology, was sociothanatological problems in the broad sense. Magdalena Sokołowska’s version of “socio-thanatology” presented at the end of the nineteen-seventies and the early eighties consisted first of all in sociodemographic considerations. The deontological and ethical-moral problems, as well as individual existential experiences associated with the process of dying, being disregarded during the period in question, appeared in M. Sokołowska’s research conceptions and papers in the nineteen-eighties. She was particularly concerned with the patterns of dying in medical institutions, conceptions of dying trajectories, processes of “waiting for death”, mechanisms of the institutionalization, commercialization and medicalization of dying, differences between the conditions and context of dying at home and in the hospital, consequences of “slow dying” for the range of social roles performed by the doctor and the nurse, the scope and character of changes in the function and structure of the family in the course of the process of dying and as a result of the death of one of its members, analysis of social behaviors after death in the institutional and noninstitutional context (hospital, hospice, home), etc. The analysis of Magdalena Sokołowska’s “socio-thanatological” achievements allows us to notice a clear evolution of her conception: from the “epidemiological-demographic” approach, oriented towards analysis of mortality, to a preference for “qualitative” interpretations based on the investigation of “subjective emotions” that accompany dying persons.

Pieśni ludowe Pojezierza Łęczyńsko-Włodawskiego. Z prac badawczych i materiałów folklorystycznych Instytutu Muzyki UMCS

<p>W artykule omówiony jest repertuar pieśni ludowych żyjących w tradycji ustnej na Pojezierzu Łęczyńsko-Włodawskim. Opracowanie zawiera tabelaryczne zestawianie incipitów pieśni, wyposażonych w odesłania do literatury i komentarze dotyczące wykonawców. Podstawą prezentowanego wywodu są rezultaty badań przeprowadzonych w latach osiemdziesiątych XX wieku przez Mirosława Grusiewicza – zamieszczone w jego pracy magisterskiej napisanej pod kierunkiem Zenona Kotera – oraz zebrane przez niego materiały fonograficzne, przechowywane obecnie w Instytucie Muzyki UMCS.</p><p>SUMMARY</p><p>The article discusses the repertoire of folk songs continued in oral tradition in the Łęczna-Włodawa Lake District. The survey contains a tabular specifi cation of song incipits with references to literature and comments concerning performers. The presentation is based on the results of research conducted in the nineteen-eighties by Mirosław Grusiewicz (they are contained in his MA thesis written under the supervision of Zenon Koter, PhD ), and on the phonographic materials he collected, now stored at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Institute of Music. In terms of its origin, the repertoire of the Łęczna-Włodawa Lake District consists of three groups. The fi rst group is the archaic collection of ritual wedding songs and couplets, the second comprises traditional common folk songs (inter alia class songs, and courtship and military songs) prone to variability and accommodation, and the third is made up of the youngest repertoire in terms of origin, containing occasional songs or those heard on the mass media.</p><p> </p>