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This paper aims to analyze the effects on German literature of the renewed interest in Nazi past. In order to do that, it considers Adorno’s and Mitscherlichs’ studies, in which they try – from a psychoanalytic point of view – to understand the mechanisms which made Germans support the leader and then made them remove their guilt. Then, the article focuses on some author of the early Sixties, in order to verify how they try to begin the Germans’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung. As far as possible, the paper examines the reception of these texts, trying to understand how and to what extent they give a contribution to overcome this collective amnesia.

Learning a foreign language means, first of all, knowing how to speak it, knowing how to use it to communicate in different situations in everyday life. A foreign language is, above all, a means of interaction with others. Therefore, the assessment of oral expression skills plays an essential role in the development of students’ communication skills. We chose to develop this subject in this paper for two main reasons: the first is purely subjective and it results from a reality observed during the experience we had during the RFL courses, as an RFL lecturer who faced the sensitive situation of assessment of students’ oral performances. And the second reason is objective and it refers to the difficulty of evaluating oral production. So, the purpose of this paper is to provide an answer to the question: How do we evaluate the oral productions of learners studying RFL? We propose two solutions that we have verified during our experience, namely: designing grids to evaluate the oral productions of RFL learners and establishing specific criteria to evaluate students’ oral performances. This paper will focus on the presentation of the different forms of oral assessment, its difficulties, as well as the assessment grid that we propose for the assessment of this skill. This mini-research might be of interest because it could inspire teachers to give more importance to the assessment of oral production, which will also have an impact on learners, making them more motivated and aware of their learning process.

This paper analyses, from a semantic and pragmatic perspective, the meaning of an old Romanian phraseological unit a se duce la Cucuiata, thus providing insights into the archaic Romanian mentality and cultural patterns. Originating from the word cucui (bump), cucuiata was used to designate an elevated plot of land. The expression included, initially, a euphemistic reference to death, as archaic burial places were usually located on hills, and constituted a linguistic device mirroring the reluctance to deal with human mortality in an undeviating way. However, the connotations of the expression have changed in contemporary Romanian language, to refer to a secluded, distant place, far from civilization, often a symbol of lack of education and limited understanding of the world (pejorative meaning). To reveal the present-day uses of this word, the paper examines and interprets contexts taken from the virtual environment.

Surrealism, the last movement of the historical avant-garde, is tackled in this paper firstly from a general standpoint, including a brief history of what it signified at the world level, narrowing then down on the local occurrences, divided into two stages: before and after 1940. Telling for the aims of this paper is Gellu Naum’s statement: “I bear in me the profound sadness of poets who have struggled their entire life not to make literature and, in the end, after having skimmed through more than one hundred pages, realized that they made nothing but literature.” This is a resigned outcry of a generation: wishing (and attempting to accomplish) the death of literature, avant-garde writers, and especially Surrealists, only managed to give it extra life and vitality through their revolted writings.

This contribution seeks to explore the potential of museum audio description (AD) – a sub-genre of general screen AD – as an instance of intersemiotic translation for non-sighted and sighted alike by drawing on a systematic review of museum AD guidelines and on extensive bibliography from Museum Studies (MS), Translation Studies (TS) and, within the latter, Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility (MA). The paper will first discuss the social mission of museums and the intrinsic diversity characterising their communication and translation practices, with a special focus on museum AD. It will then move on to the wider value of screen AD; although the latter is primarily intended as an access tool to help blind and visually impaired individuals construct a mental image of what they cannot partially or totally see, its recognised benefits for other groups (Perego 2017) will be addressed. Similarly, the paper will discuss the potential of museum AD for a wider audience by presenting insights from museum-specific AD guidelines. Museum AD may arguably be revisited as a form of museum translation for everybody, which could truly foster social inclusion.

Internet connectivity has increased over the years and consequently, new business opportunities have occurred. Online learning platforms represent one of such opportunities. A few online learning platforms have recorded significant growth, reaching tens of millions of users. These are the MOOC (massive online open courseware) platforms. The shift to the subscription economy is accelerating globally. The subscription-based model is transforming multiple industries such as manufacturing, media, journalism, transportation or enterprise software. However, is this business model a good fit for online learning platforms? In the current paper, we are examining the impact of the subscription economy on the online learning industry, especially on MOOC platforms. For this, we have performed a comparative analysis of the offers from the most important MOOC platforms and we have evaluated to which extent their business models have adapted to the subscription-based economy. The novelty of this paper consists in the examination of the online learning platforms through the lenses of a subscription-based model and the analysis of their recurring revenue sources.

In order to ensure the safety of engineering structures and especially those with special regimen such as the viaducts requiring careful monitoring of spatial displacements, it is necessary to find an optimal combination of criteria that are evaluated by a multi-criteria analysis to avoid major structural degradation and their effects on of the entire structure that can generate catastrophes with major losses of human lives. In this paper we will present an optimization of the estimation functions of the evaluation criteria behaviour for the time monitoring of an engineering structure. In this paper, we are analysing a structure that has 50 years and that has a vital significance for Galati city from Romania. It is a 1.3 km-long viaduct structure connecting the city of Galati with ArcelorMittal steel company. The current legislation requires a plan for permanent monitoring of displacement in order to avoid accidents that can lead to loss of human life. Thus, we will quantify and discuss the effects of the different evaluation criteria behaviour and we will choose those that maximize the user's chances of responding without departing from those values that keep their study credible. In order to obtain the results of the multicriteria analysis, three monitoring cycles with three types of instruments on more than 30 tracking points were designed and performed.

The restrictions on the movement of persons imposed during the pandemic have highlighted that the whole process of awarding the public procurement contract can be carried out electronically (from identifying the need to signing the contract). One of the tools that can improve this process (as well as other operations adjacent to it) is the electronic signature. The purpose of this paper is to review the current state of play and examine to which extent (spread) the electronic signature is implemented and used, the benefits of them in public acquisitions, comparing with now (obsolete) handwritten signature. Using the electronic signature is an effective tool that did not reach its full potential. The qualified electronic signature (QES) offers multiple benefits in doing business with public organizations. Economic operators and public institutions/companies within EU countries will likely need to comply to be considered a party on a legitimate legal agreement. Our qualitative research on the current state of play of electronic signature market has revealed a number of key factors that influence the implementation and usage of this important tool for public acquisitions. The novelty of the paper is the analysis on usefulness of the electronic signature in the public procurement field. Starting from this article, research can be carried out to identify indicators for measuring the performance of the public procurement process carried out by public authorities, and the bidding activities.

This paper analyzes two dystopias belonging to different worlds and eras: one from the 20th century, We, by Russian writer E. Zamjatin and the other from the 21st century, Notre vie dans les forêts, by the French M. Darrieussecq. This literary journey of a century allows us to focus on themes dear to the dystopian genre but especially related to the lives of today’s readers, in the spirit of engaged literature. In particular, readers will be prompted to reflect, with the help of some critical insights, primarily on the disasters of the Anthropocene and on the depersonalization experienced by humans in a world that changes too quickly and in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman seem to have been obliterated. Starting from this last element, the article considers a new model of inclusion of the different, the posthuman, through the studies of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway.

The global entertainment world has recently seen an increase in post-apocalyptic products, clearly reflecting a public demand for catastrophe-related narratives. This ‘catastrophilia’ finds a relevant example in the dystopian works by Komatsu Sakyō, one of Japan's most celebrated science fiction authors, beginning with the first novel Nihon chinbotsu (1973). Having become a transmedia product thanks to film, manga, and anime adaptations, the story portrays a fictional version of “The Big One” able to sink the entire Japanese archipelago in an unknown future. What is the reason behind such success? By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective intertwining psychological, philosophical and media studies, this paper examines the popularity achieved by Japan Sinks and its mediascape to unveil the addiction to the apocalyptic narratives that goes beyond the ecotopic purpose of re-establishing a symbiotic contact between humans and the environment. Instead, it results from a pathological desire for violence and death and an atavistic tendency for morbid curiosity.

In the 20th century, it is common to find some rewritings of classical myths set in post-apocalyptic scenarios. The aim of this paper is to propose an innovative research field that combine the study of dystopian literature and myth criticism. The new myth-critical approach considers three social innovations: informatization, which is essential in dystopian literature as well; migration and postcolonial literature, which is linked to the concept of the otherness science fiction thrives on; and finally, consumerism, which leads to eternal technical reproducibility, also presented in the dystopian works, especially in the concept of cloning. A concrete example are the dystopian adaptations of the myth of Antigone: the movie I Cannibali by Liliana Cavani, the epistolary novel In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster, and the play Antígona Gelada by the portuguese author Armando Nascimento Rosa.

Reflections on the collective traumas that have shaped Japan’s more recent history (primarily the triple disaster of Fukushima) have ignited a new boom in dystopian productions that have achieved an unprecedented success. These narratives explore themes that deal with the erosion of the ecosystem in which humans live – but also of the human body itself. However, it is not only human beings who play a part in some of these dystopias: the city of Tokyo also plays a key role within them. The purpose of this paper is to explore this peculiar role of Tokyo in three selected case studies: namely, Adou (2021-) by Amano Jaku, Soundtrack (2003) by Furukawa Hideo, and The Emissary (2013) by Tawada Yōko. Destroyed and rebuilt in multiple media productions over the last seventy years and at the center of psychedelic futuristic visions, Tokyo becomes either a swarming center of human life or an abandoned wasteland, an urban skeleton that stands as a reminder of the impending or preceding catastrophe, forcing the reader to think about the actual future of our urban spaces – and whether it will include us humans or not.

The present paper aims at analyzing two works of contemporary Irish fiction, namely, Notes from a Coma (2005) by Mike McCormack and The Fjord of Killary (2012) by Kevin Barry. I argue that both works not only mirror what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the ‘global’ and the ‘planetary’, but also reflect the non-human space and time scales that Timothy Morton identifies as one of the properties of hyperobjects. Moreover, the two novels are deeply rooted in the history of Ireland, and especially in the semi-peripheral position occupied by the country within the capitalist world system. The intermingling of various narrative layers together with speculative and realistic tropes conveys the epiphenomenality of our lived experience, characterized by the not-yet predictable consequences of planetary climate crisis and the ever-shifting demands of global capitalism.

This paper investigates the representation of bodies in two contemporary Japanese works, namely Murata Sayaka’s Seimeishiki (生命式 , Life Ceremony, 2013) and Ono Miyuki’s Karada o uru koto (身体を売ること “Selling the Body,” 2020). Both novellas are set in the future and share the trope of the ‘uncanny,’ heightened through the transgression of boundaries thanks to the presence of what I refer to as ‘consumed bodies,’ and female protagonists as an ‘unhinged woman,’ the anti-heroine interpreted as a feminist icon recently emblazoned in social networks. In Life Ceremony, the Japanese government has approved anthropophagy as a social practice; in “Selling the Body,” healthy flesh bodies are sold to survive in polluted environments and replaced by robotic ones. Present anxieties concerning the control over bodies and their reproductivity, as well as the fear of objectification are expressed through the practices of cannibalism and cyberization. Consequently, readers are forced to rethink the human nature and ethics in a posthuman dialectic within a hyper-capitalistic society.

This paper is intended as a brief overview of the most recent challenges in teaching translation, from the perspective of the ever-increasing need for professional communication in this field in a digitalized environment seen both as a workplace and a place of business. The paper advocates the introduction of the interpersonal, intercultural, communicational, and negotiating skills in parallel with the teaching of translation as a purely linguistic matter and with introducing the more technical aspects of the profession, such as CAT tools, terminological database search or compiling, machine translation, etc.

This paper argues that research in Buddhism must have a soteriological focus. To demonstrate this, an overview of the Cūḷamālunkya Sutta (MN 63) is presented. This sutta consists of a conversation between the Buddha and one of his students, and it reveals that Buddhism’s topics of inquiry must address how one can be free from suffering. The implication of this conversation – the soteriological focus – seems to suggest that Buddhist research excludes topics in metaphysics, such as addressing the nature of the universe (if it has a beginning or an end, if it is finite or infinite, and so forth), or the nature of the self. Soteriology seems to suggest that ethics is the only focus of research in Buddhism; that is, to know how to be free from suffering, one must study how one should live and conduct oneself. Though this appears to be the case, this paper will show that research in Buddhism is not limited in this manner. Instead of excluding metaphysical research entirely, Buddhism instead excludes research that is done for its own sake; topics must therefore be researched for the sake of soteriology. Thus, the research implication of the Cūḷamālunkya Sutta is not that certain topics are unable to be researched, but rather that a qualification of soteriology is attached to topics of research.

This paper examines the urban space as an ecology of anxiety in post-9/11 literature. After the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima in August 1945, survivors testified of experiencing prior to the bombing an anticipatory trauma known as bukimirooted in the belief that a catastrophic event was forthcoming. Paul K. Saint-Amour suggests that similar experiences to bukimi are not exclusive to the residents of Hiroshima but came to structure post-war urban experience as a result of a nuclear condition wrought by the Cold War. My paper explores whether a contemporary bukimi can be identified in post-9/11 literature. The post-9/11 novel—works which directly or indirectly acknowledge the terrorist attacks—present familiar but ambiguous forms of risk engendered by the threat of terrorism and maintained in the form of an urban-originated anxiety. This anxiety is rooted in the spectre of an event that’s never total or conclusive—an event that promises witness testimony and the maintenance of traumatic memories, but which also eclipses calamitous structures (like global warming) that are gradual and continuous. To unravel this contemporary species of bukimi, my paper examines depictions of the urban space in the post-9/11 literature of Foer and McEwan.

The place given to the lexicon in language teaching and learning is very important because "it is from the lexicon that syntax is organised" (Courtillon, 1989: 146) [1] and because it is impossible to learn how a language works without words. The word is the pivot around which grammatical syntax is organised. It is also on lexical unity that the semantic coherence of discourse is based and, moreover, the word in co-occurrence with other words of discourse provides cultural information characteristic of a given community. In the first part of this paper, we aim to identify the role of memory and context in vocabulary teaching-learning and to capture the features of vocabulary teaching-learning in the communicative approach, as well as the goals of a lexical approach, the selection of lexical content and the way of its presentation to learners in the RLS class. The second part of this paper will focus on outlining a typology of activities and exercises that we could propose for vocabulary acquisition taking into account that modern vocabulary teaching is not a mechanical reproduction of a list of words learned by rote. The process of learning a new term aims to provide learners with the immediate possibility of using the acquired word in a variety of contexts.

In this paper we have emphasised the importance of intercultural communication, which contributes to harmony between people and the establishment of collaborative relationships. A major role in people's lives is attributed to culture, as a dimension of our lives that defines a people's level of education, history, values and norms of life, the language we speak, the way we dress, how we communicate and relate to others. This paper is a brief foray into the realm of culture and intercultural communication. I wanted to bring to the audience's attention some of the essential aspects of our culture, so that the cultural values of the Romanian people can be fully understood. I also defined the concepts of culture and intercultural communication in the sense of established writers. According to researchers in the field, intercultural education "is a necessary opening towards the other, towards intercultural dialogue between different ethnic groups". [3, p. 34] Through intercultural education and communication students become aware of the value of their own culture, increasing their self-esteem and they will also get to know and perhaps appreciate the culture of those belonging to another ethnic group. We have paid attention to the iceberg of culture model so that the conceptual delineation of culture is logically supported. The examples underlying the description of the 'iceberg of culture' can easily constitute the concrete exploration of the reality we all know. I want to bring to the fore the importance and awareness of the cultural values of our people. Knowing ourselves we can better understand others, who belong to groups, communities, ethnic minorities or other nationalities with whom we come into contact or live together effectively. The world is in a constant state of flux; people come into physical and virtual contact with "others" and therefore in our mission as teachers we have an obligation to inform, research and train pupils in intercultural skills and competences in order to "learn to live together with others" (UNESCO's International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, whose constant concern is with this concept - intercultural communication).

This paper aims to describe the metrical features of tumbuizo, Swahili poems which, allegedly due to their antiquity, present very different stylistic elements from later compositions based on regular metres inspired from Arabic poetry. The particularity of tumbuizo poems has often led scholars to label them as unmetrical; I will demonstrate here that instead they do present a metre, yet very different from the later, syllabic, ones, and I will expose its main features, with a particular emphasis on the role of stress in its structuring. A study of metre and prosody in Swahili literature has rarely explored those domains of poetry which are outside the sphere of classical metres, whose constraints are well known by both scholars and Swahili composers; it is my hope, therefore, that this paper will contribute to a new focus on this field of literary studies, often neglected.

In Maryse Condé’s satirical autobiography, What is Africa to Me?, she recollects and re-evaluates her decade-long stay in four West African countries. The book also affords readers the chance to follow her trajectory from a racially Othered adolescent female to an ardent follower of Negritude, especially Aimé Césaire’s brand, which she associates with her personal re-creation and the uplift of the whole of the Black race. Anchored in postcolonial and feminist perspectives on Othering, this paper examines the role that commodification, Negritude, and disillusionment play in the narrative. In this counter-discourse, pervasive Othering is perceptible in patriarchy, one-party governments, and the chasm between West Africans and diasporan Africans. It is argued that the writer’s ultimate disavowal of Africa is principally a function of her objectification by the post-independence elite. The paper concludes that, far from being blameless, Maryse Condé herself contributes to the Othering of her husband, Mamadou Condé, and of Africa.

This paper presents a synthetic view on the linguistic changes that Romanian undergoes in netspeak and sheds light on the virtual environment conventions that help build meaning in cyberspace. The study goes through all linguistic layers, starting from the use of punctuation, graphical and phonetic alterations to morphosyntactic adaptations, as well as lexical and semantic trends. The pragmatics of the environment is also tackled, by presenting the most important netspeak conventions that combine text and image to generate meaning: emojis, gifs, and memes, and exploring their possible pragmatic functions, as resulted from the current state of the research in the field. The examples presented in the paper are taken from instant messaging applications.

Cinematically, Yoruba filmmakers represent different aspects of the Nigerian nation and various elements of traditional cultures, customs, and praxes. In particular, they pay close attention to the influences of supernatural powers and metaphysical agents in human times and affairs, and they represent them in elaborate visual narratives. Against this cinematic backdrop, this paper investigates the representations of àjẹ́, erroneously known as witchcraft, in Yoruba language films. The paper posits that contemporary Yoruba language filmmakers copy the cinematic models that the late Chief Hubert Ogunde and Alhaji Yekini Ajileye created to make movies about witches. By focusing on the representations of witchcraft in two purposefully selected films, Ìyá-Àjẹ́́ (2017) and Àgbà-Mẹ́ta (2016), this article argues that the binary model that Yoruba filmmakers adopt in their portrayal of witches is a tired formula. Instead, this study proposes àjẹ́ism as a theoretical model for studying the àṣẹ vital force that witches own, as well as the relevance of àṣẹ to women’s empowerment, civil protests, and space claiming. Thus, this essay proposes that we reimagine àjẹ́ as a cultural resistance tool that women can appropriate to fight injustices and oppressions.

This paper presents the noun class system of Bwala, a nearly undocumented and undescribed Bantu language of the Teke group spoken in the Kinshasa Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Genealogically speaking, Bwala belongs to the Kasai-Ngounie (Extended) subclade, one of the major monophyletic groups within West-Coastal Bantu. Bwala has seven singular classes (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 15) and five plural classes (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) which form nine singular/plural noun class pairings (1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 5/10, 5/4, 7/8, 7/6, 9/6, 14/6). The paper furthermore addresses the diachronic changes which the Bwala noun class system underwent with respect to Proto-Bantu (PB). We compare these to the changes identified by Hyman, Lionnet, and Ngolele (2019) for Teke-Ewo, a closely related variety, with the aim of identifying morphological innovations shared between varieties of the so-called Teke group (Bantu B70).

From its transformation into a taboo and its hiding under the so-called “Moldovan language” or under the euphemistic expression “state language”, to its regained status recognition as an official language, the Romanian language spoken in the Republic of Moldova has undergone impressive reforms in the last 60 years. Meant to erase the awareness of citizens’ ethnic identity and turn a majority language into a minority one, all the laws and regulations issued on the field succeeded in setting numerous barriers for speakers of Romanian in the Republic of Moldova. Either manifested as social constraints or materialized into an assumed rejection of mother tongue usage, all these laws have demonstrated their usefulness and major impact on the Romanian-speaking population. This article is the result of our research carried out over 10 years with the support of students, Moldovan citizens, from the master's degree program "Romanian Language - Identity and Cultural Awareness". Our analysis shows that although the status of the Romanian language in the Republic of Moldova has changed, making the official leap from ”ethnic language” to official state language, speakers still use it with the fear that they are not speaking it correctly and that they might be in danger of using structures that are inappropriate for the Romanian language because that they have many years of experience in using the Russian language as lingua franca. In this paper, we provide arguments to demonstrate the evolution of the Romanian language spoken in Moldova, despite all the social and political barriers imposed over time.

This paper examines Akan indigenous concepts for “stress”, “distress”, “sorrow”, and “depression” through the interaction between language, culture, mind and the body. It applies the theory of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), with an emphasis on the theory of embodiment. The majority of Akan expressions and proverbs for “stress”, “distress”, “sorrow”, and “depression” are derived from body part terms via embodiment. The nature of the semantic patterns and how the Akans perceive these emotions from the core pillars of their language and culture are explored. In addition to examining the use of body part expressions, the paper further discusses the use of idioms and proverbs to comment on the emotions mentioned above.

This paper gives an account of sociolinguistic aspects of Chasu personal names and some ways in which they relate to the modes of address among the Vaasu people of Same District in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania. It reveals that Chasu personal names are both linguistic and socio-cultural phenomena and are formed by both lexical and affixation processes. From the linguistic point of view, Chasu names demonstrate meaningful morphological and derivational processes that are linked to gender marking and hierarchy of birth. From a socio-cultural perspective, personal names are linked with circumstances surrounding the birth, such as time and day of delivery, place of birth, and natural events. This study describes how personal names are chosen and bestowed upon children, and how beliefs, values, social practices and human experience are reflected in the naming practices. This paper further demonstrates that names are not only labels for individual or group identification but are also inseparable from the modes of address and manner of expression in the Chasu speech community.

The end of World War II and the trauma of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mark a complete rupture in Japan’s recent history. Both Japanese and non-Japanese authors of children’s literature have addressed this traumatic memory in their works, aiming to pass it on to the next generations and thus contributing to the construction of a carefully curated postmemory (Hirsch 2012) that conveys specific messages and feelings. There are several perspectives from which the catastrophe is retold, shifting from those who are the “victims” to those who can be considered the “accomplices” and influencing the way this specific memory is passed on to young readers. Through the analysis and comparison of three works of children's literature, including Hiroshima no uta (1960) by Imanishi Sukeyuki, this paper sets out to explore a new way of looking at children's literature that deals with the trauma of the atomic bombing, exploring the role that these texts have played in the transmission of this historical memory to later generations.

This paper has one main goal: to provide a first description of the tense-aspect system of Mengaka. The paper indicates that Mengaka shows various tenses (past tenses, a present tense, a future tense) and aspects (perfective, habitual, progressive). Furthermore, the dividing lines between the degrees of past in Mengaka appear to be at least basically rigid. It is also argued in this paper that the tense-aspect system of Mengaka can be analysed as operating according to twelve tense-aspect categories. These categories may have one or more than one basic use. Also, they may be manifested by any of the following: the lack of a tense and an aspect marking, a tonal alternation, a free-standing marker or the use of a construction which may include tense and/or aspect markers and a nasal verb prefix.

Petina Gappah’s debut novel, The Book of Memory (2015), centres on the lives of two ‘white’ characters in post-independent Zimbabwe: Memory, the protagonist-narrator and a woman with albinism, and Lloyd, Memory’s adoptive father and a white, closeted gay man. Both characters are rendered to the margins of Zimbabwean society. This paper analyses how Memory and Lloyd are brought together by their respective forms of marginalisation. Memory is a person with albinism and her whiteness is perceived as dirty and a contagion. On the other hand, Lloyd is a white, closeted gay man in Mugabe’s homophobic Zimbabwe. Making use of Ann Cvetkovich’s reading of trauma and Robert McRuer’s concept of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’, in this paper we argue that Gappah’s novel depicts a refiguring of the marginalised body as one capable of agency and existence in its own right. In the process, such refiguring destabilises race and sexuality as social constructs.

Polonius, Romanian author Victor Cilincă’s farcical rewriting of Hamlet, is worth mentioning among the many postmodernist adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, despite the fact that it is virtually unknown to both theatregoers and critics. The play premiered in 1996, in Galati, having been ‘hidden’ in the writer’s drawer for more than a decade for fear that censorship might grasp its anti-totalitarian implications. In 2011, it was translated by Petru Iamandi for an American indie press. Prefaced by a brief overview of drawer literature and “refashioning of Shakespeare’s image along the lines of Communist ideology” (Colipcă-Ciobanu 2016: 26), in communist Romania, the paper focuses on the meta-dimension of the two-act play, as well as on the subversive aspects identifiable at the textual level.

While Kenyan colonial subjects became citizens at independence, women were excluded from state resources, social services, and full political enfranchisement. This was neither the decolonizing future they had been promised nor the one they had envisioned; for Kenyan women, independence often held more symbolic than material meaning. Continued landlessness – which overlapped with perpetuated structural gendered inequalities and various forms of political exclusion – coloured the ways in which Kenyan women made sense of independence. Relying on archival and oral sources, this article explores how Kenyan women were prohibited from exercising the fullest rights offered and protected by the early postcolonial state. In examining the multilayered politics of women’s marginalization, this paper elucidates how these exclusions shaped political imaginations, and in particular, Kenyan women’s notion of temporality, often marked by a sense of stasis or being placed outside of time. “There Was No Change” thus not only sheds light on the broad question of how gender shapes temporal logics, but it also contributes to an emerging literature on gendered notions of time during political transition.

Nowadays, ensuring a balance between the right to freedom of expression of journalists and the right to protection of reputation represents a challenge for many states, including the Republic of Moldova. Although journalists are allowed to spread information that offends, shocks or disturbs, they are called to Court often by the subjects of their articles, even in front of The European Court of Human Rights. In some cases, the Cout gives justice to the journalists, considering that articles respect the principles of responsible journalism. In other cases, the Court concluded that journalists exceeded the limits of freedom of expression, holding that there had been a violation of article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights regarding the right to protection of reputation. The paper aims to analyse the role of The European Court of Human Rights in restoring the balance between these two rights, relying on Case of Busuioc v. Moldova, Case Timpul Info-Magazin and Anghel v. Moldova, Case Flux and Samson v. Moldova, Case Savițchi v. Moldova.

The object of the study is the Odesa region and its activities in the field of cross-border cooperation with the neighboring territories of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The paper examines the theoretical foundations of cross-border cooperation. The concept of cross-border cooperation is defined, its main forms are defined, the foreign experience in this field is summarized and a method for determining the effectiveness of the Euroregion's activities is proposed. Cross-border activity in the Odesa region was analyzed. Factors affecting the effectiveness of cross-border cooperation are identified. A SWOT analysis of the main economic indicators affecting the functioning of the Euroregion was developed. The effectiveness of such activities is analyzed. The main directions for improving cooperation in the economic sphere are proposed, namely the creation of a tripartite joint body for attracting foreign direct investment, the creation of cross-border clusters, in particular, the creation of a joint strategic plan for the development of areas such as the agro-industrial complex, tourism and transport are proposed.

This paper discusses the phenomenon of underapplication of palatalization in a Pig Latin game in Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language. Akan Pig Latin (henceforth APL), which is popularly known in Akan as Megesege, is a language game played usually by Akan youth. The game is played by appending the velar consonant /ɡ/ to the right of every vowel in the input word or phrase and then copying the vowel of the base syllable to form a CV structure. Whenever the base syllable contains /i, ɪ, e/ or /ɛ/, the manipulation performed by the game creates a palatalizing environment, in which a velar segment is followed by a front vowel. In regular Akan phonology, such sequences tend to undergo the process of palatalization. This paper provides evidence to show that in the forms produced by APL, palatalization fails to apply in the expected contexts. The underapplication of palatalization is accounted for within the framework of Optimality Theory. It is argued that the process is blocked by a high-ranking OCP constraint that bans adjacent [Coronal] segments in neighboring syllables. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The purpose of the current paper has been to analyse, in parallel, the Social Self represented in the works of two brothers, William and Henry James. The Consciousness of Self is a very controversial and subtle concept. It differs from culture to culture, and in some of them it does not even exist. This section deals with the depiction of the Social Self as a constituent component of the Consciousness of Self in Henry James’s novel “The Ambassadors” (1903). It is considered one of the best novels of his last period of literary achievements and it offers a fascinating journey into the world of human passions, intricate situations, and deep feelings. “The Ambassadors” is a novel that shows what impact society and experience can have on one’s Social Self. The fixed focalization in “The Ambassadors” allows one to perceive the Social Selves of the secondary characters from the point of view of the protagonist, Lambert Strether. Thus, the paper attempts at examining Henry James’s focus on the nature of selfhood by means of reflector character and the brilliant portrayal of the full complexity of the Social Self of his characters.

The twenty-first century is an era of radical, unexpected and fast changes in the political, social and cultural scene. Reality has become a slave to the socio-political interventions and instability leading to numerous questions rather than answers. The choice of Inferno is based on this observation of the 21st century as the rapid pace of changing events has stimulated a growing need for truth, reality and explanations. Brown’s cryptic plot and his claim of Fact [i] create the very focus of this paper which is the question of historicity in this text. Put into the 21st century’s historical context, Brown revisits Dantean Inferno[ii] of The Divine Comedy[iii] through the thematic focus on the overpopulation as a recent concern of the century, the metaphorical representation of characters, and their linguistic. As such, this paper will study the historicity of Brown’s Inferno[iv], highlight its parodic dimension, and unveil the hellish nature of the twenty-first century through the re-incarnation of the ancient fears into the present times and the deconstruction of the biblical image of hell. [i] Fact here is a concept and a claim in almost all of Dan Brown’s thriller novels at the very first page. The choice of Italics is meant to convey this idea. [ii] Will be referred to as Inferno D later on [iii] The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written in three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It was written by Dante Alighieri during the fourteenth Century [iv] Will be referred to as Inferno

International and regional public health policy have been promoting an integration and regulation of traditional medicine and their practitioners since the late 1970s with the aim to ensure the safety of the traditional healers’ patients and to improve healthcare services in rural areas by utilising traditional healers as auxiliary healthcare personnel. Contrary to many other African countries, such as South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, Namibia has still not officially recognised traditional medicine and its practitioners as a complementary healthcare system. Nevertheless, traditional healers continue to provide their services to Namibians. This paper seeks to explore how the Namibian government, the public health system and individual traditional healers interact and collaborate in the absence of an official recognition of traditional medicine in Namibia. Data presented in this paper is based on an ethnographic exploration in Namibia from December 2011 until May 2012, including several in-depth-interviews with six traditional healers. This article is an abridged and updated version of the fifth chapter of Maylin Meincke's award-winning DSocSci thesis submitted to the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Helsinki (2016).

Being a “cool medium” (McLuhan 1964) comics provide less sensory information and therefore demands more involvement and/or ‘completion’ by the reader/viewer. They ask for slowness, as the viewer has to recompose, understand, and question the existing relation between words and pictures. This mode of fruition contrasts with the rapid way we generally consume news (even though they might use a similar visual-verbal syntax). Their slowness help comics visualize the stories of those who have been ignored/neglected by the international arena and makes the reader witness human rights violation and abuses (Chute 2016). This paper aims to discuss how Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) (re)narrates the past and present relationship between Aboriginal people and (all) Canadians. This comics testifies to the existence of allied depictions (as Joe Sacco is not of Aboriginal descent and does not appropriate Indigenous stories) that aim to break (even controversially) the silence about past and present sufferings of the Dene peoples in Canada, but also shows forms of Indigenous activism and healing practices that aim to re-construct community ties.

Feminisms have gained increasing visibility in the last decade, becoming part of public and media discourse in Western societies. The popularisation of gender discourses has been accompanied by the growing production of feminist guides, handbooks and manifestoes produced by journalists, influencers and celebrities to spread feminism among young women. Nevertheless, the actual articulations of feminist narratives are often intertwined with neoliberal postfeminist discourses on individualism that reinforce existing hierarchies of power. These narratives are opposed by others that question individualism and deconstruct existing power hierarchies. This paper explores the problematic outcomes of the feminist entanglement with neoliberalism, which result in the flattening of gender, race and class differences. Then, the neoliberal postfeminist dominant narrative is contrasted by and confronted with a critical analysis of two contemporary feminist manifestoes that, in different ways, oppose individualism and deconstruct existing power structures through intersectional inclusive practices.

The project presented in this contribution is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and sociology, as it stands as a design and programmatic verification of possible strategies of physical-spatial and socio-cultural interchange between different social groups. The paper invites a critical reflection on the concept of ‘integration’, starting from the diffuse inhabited space with particular attention to the role of public space in today’s society. In particular, the study explores the role of architecture in the creation of a model of social integration, presenting a project aimed at promoting inclusion in schools in Berlin. The research project presented is based on the concept of transculturalism, a cultural perspective broader than multiculturalism, which transcends the boundaries of ‘communities’ in favour of a single, broader society able to coexist according to common principles and values.

Tachibana Sotoo (1894–1959), a novelist unknown outside Japan and not widely read in Japan either, was among the writers who depicted various forms of nonheteronormative sexuality in his work. Best known for his ghost stories later adapted into films by director Nakagawa Nobuo (1905-1989), Tachibana also published Nanshoku Monogatari (A Tale of Male Love) in 1952. This novel, largely inspired by the author’s own experience, humorously recounts his crushes on his attractive classmates. The appreciation of teenage, androgynous beauty is central in this work where same-sex attraction is presented without moral judgment. The aim of this paper is to examine how Tachibana represents male-male desire in Nanshoku Monogatari and to investigate whether the novel challenged heteronormativity in post-war Japanese society. The novel will therefore also be analysed in relation to the homoerotic literature born in the Edo period (1603-1868) and later developed in pre-war modernist literature, in which romantic relationships between schoolboys were often depicted.

The translation is a process that goes beyond linguistic transformations and demands cross-cultural awareness. However, mistakes resulting from apparently similar linguistic structures in the source and target language as well as narrow cultural views can compromise the quality of the translated text. Therefore, the target audience may lose the thread of the text line or be completely misled. The goal of this paper is to discuss the concepts of the first language and cultural interference in the translation process as well as to bring forward some examples of frequent loan translations resulting from this phenomenon. Attempts to translate culture-specific patterns will be illustrated and the applied translation strategies analysis will confirm or refute their efficiency in bringing the source culture closer to the target audience.

Marianne Thamm’s memoir Hitler, Verwoerd, Mandela and Me provides an interesting take on adoption: the adoption of an immigrant by a destination country and vice versa. This paper investigates Thamm’s navigation of the geographic, social, and linguistic spaces as an immigrant in Apartheid-era South Africa, and how it aids in creating her cognitive-affective map. To do so, the cognitive-affective map of adopting a new country, as well as of being adopted by a country, is applied twofold. Thamm meaningfully engages in two narrative strands (Singley, 2011) often found in adoption memoirs. These strands focus on the adoptee as being unadoptable, and as being part of a new beginnings narrative. Regarding the first strand, Thamm reflects on immigrants' 'unadoptability' in their new country, exposing normative prejudices, injustices, and ideologies in the process. Further, she uses her agency as a journalist in an effort to expose how this 'unadoptability' extends to the Black population in Apartheid South Africa. As for the second strand, her representation of herself, as the country's adoptee, enables her to take part in a new beginnings narrative, and to show how she takes agency and admits culpability in the need for this narrative to be created. In other words, Thamm admits that her passive resistance to the apartheid regime does not make her innocent to the injustices committed against the oppressed; as a white person, albeit a marginalized immigrant, she enjoys the privilege that accompanies her race during the regime. Finally, Thamm undertakes what can be classified as an adoption reunion journey to Europe, which further shapes her cognitive-affective maps and navigation of South African spaces as an immigrant. She reflects on how, after Apartheid, South Africa adopted back those it rejected under the regime.

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a relatively innovative, still emerging concept that entered the area of international public law a few years ago. After the international community failed to take action during the atrocities in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, due to various motives, the concept emerged as an alternative to extend one's protection over another, but also to state's protection that must be exercised over its own population. The norm seeks to never permit an outbreak of mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Under this norm, states fall under the obligation to exercise the protection that they can offer in order to assist the United Nations in establishing and settling peace and, simultaneously, accomplishing the protection of human rights. This paper seeks to elucidate the circumstances in which the application of the norm could be justified, as it may be subjected to abuses; its limits, considering the fact that an uncontrolled and vicious use may violate the principle of non-intervention, state's sovereignty and other international principles; but also, the controversies it triggers, oscillating between being a legal norm or a political principle.

This article aims to check the hypothesis that contemporary writers should be prone to multiculturalism and multilingualism in the context of redefining Weltliteratur, as well as the liaisons between languages and cultures. To this end, the paper surveys several non-fictional works by Romanian literary critic Gheorghe Grigurcu, listing and explaining several terms in Latin, French, English, and German that the author weaves within the text.

This research gives an overview of the Vlach identity in southeast Albania within the pattern of self-designation. I try to identify identity aspects of the place and people under the influence of border and transnationalism, during communism and post-communism, and the transition from communism to a democratic system. I discuss how during the two systems the place and people developed a marginalized identity affected by the lack of the Center’s attention (Tirana) and by developing policies. In this paper, I debate about politics of identity and politics of assimilation relating to the Vlach minority in the county of Korça. Particular attention is given to Census Albania 2011 while I explain the assimilation politics of the Albanian state. Significant is the fact that I focused my study in my own country as part of anthropology at home, because I saw it worth utilizing the repertoire of being familiar with my own people’s culture, including also the acquaintances of language-Albanian and Romanian and with people of the area. The research was conducted in rural villages with a high presence of Vlach minority, in order to analyze inter-ethnic relations. The social research map targeted the village of Voskopoja, former Moscopole or Moscopolis as it is also a multiculturalist landmark affected by transnationalism and transmigration processes. In observing identity aspects, I employed a total experience, demanding my anthropological resources, intellectual, political, intuitive, native, and insiderness-outsiderness observation forms of knowledge. Had to measure the controlled information the locals delivered to me or to other researchers who had already produced texts about Vlachs.

Starting with a description of British Unitarianism, the present paper sheds light on how a particular expression of Christianity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England influenced the development of early feminist ideas. Unitarians, followers of a Christian denomination that rejects the doctrine of Trinity, believed that reason was a gift from God. They also upheld that both men and women were entitled to use their reason to interpret the Scriptures and arrive at rational conclusions. This article shows how those tenets were instrumental for writer Mary Leman Grimstone and her advocacy in favour of women’s rights. Grimstone, as part of Radical Unitarian circles, used literature to denounce the oppression of women, vindicate their right to proper education, and demand changes to the institution of marriage.

Female migration over the decades has become a common feature in most regions. Many women face many challenges in their new environment in terms of assimilation and accommodation. This paper documents the narratives of immigrant women who have been victims of domestic violence and explores how immigration related factors such as xenophobia, language, unemployment and lack of familial support hinder their attempts to seek help thus making settlement and assimilation in the new environment particularly challenging. Many are imprisoned in marriages and relationships of domestic abuse. This paper locates the argument in the context of intersectionality, that race, class, ethnicity, religion and gender are important categories of analysis to understand the complexities women’s immigration challenges. Findings of this paper will contribute to new knowledge in the context of gender and migration amongst immigrant groups in South Africa.

This paper is founded on research that was conducted in July 2015 at a maximum-security correctional institution in Westville, Durban, South Africa. It focuses on the impact of incarceration of African (Black) migrants. The current outbreak of xenophobic violence, especially since 2008, supposedly committed by foreign nationals in South Africa, has prompted interest in the number of incarcerated migrants and migration overall. For purposes of this paper interviews were conducted randomly, using a systematic sampling technique with remand foreign nationals incarcerated at the Medium A, Durban Westville Correctional Centre. The experiences of foreign national detainees are recorded in order to augment their opinions to the discussions on crime, migration and xenophobia taking place at micro and macro levels in South Africa.