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Studia austriaca XXXII (2024) - Call for Papers

Članak donosi neobjavljene i u to vrijeme neke objavljene dokumente o Stepincu iz Meštrovićeva arhiva na Sveučilištu Notre Dame u Indiani, SAD, na kojem je Meštrović predavao od 1955. godine do svoje smrti 1962. godine. Uz ostale, donosi se Meštrovićevo pismo kardinalu Spellmanu iz 1954. godine označeno oznakom „povjerljivo“, pismo Alojzija Stepinca Meštroviću od 3. listopada 1956. godine, Meštrovićeva čestitka Stepincu u povodu njegova 60. rođendana, prepiska sa č. s. Reginom Mary C. S. J. nakon Meštrovićeva posjeta Stepincu 1959. godine. U članku su dokumenti dijelom transkribirani i prikazani su, tj. obrađeni najvažniji sadržaji. Dokumenti su nastali u razdoblju od 1949. do 1960. godine. Dokumentacija pokazuje da je Ivan Meštrović iznimno poštovao Stepinca te ga je smatrao nevinim u odnosu na sva nedjela koja su mu se u montiranom sudskom procesu i u javnosti stavljala na teret.

This paper explores the profound lessons of the Qur’ān about equality and social justice, as well as how these lessons relate to promoting world peace. The goal is to clarify the fundamental ideas of the Qur’ān that support gender equality, economic justice, and human dignity while examining their applicability in the modern world. The study uses a thorough examination of Qur’ānic verses, closely examining particular allusions to social issues and their historical background to produce complex interpretations. One of the main goals is to determine the connection between social justice, equality, and world peace. The study recognizes and tackles widespread misunderstandings and historical obstacles that have impeded the successful application of Qur’ānic principles, even despite the rich Islamic tradition that places a strong emphasis on these values. Additionally, the paper evaluates the current obstacles to social justice advocacy and offers solutions. A thorough examination of the role of Muslim communities and leaders is conducted, emphasizing their obligations to advance social justice and peace worldwide. Furthermore, a comparative examination with alternative religious and ideological viewpoints is conducted to find points of agreement for interfaith communication and cooperation. The article concludes by making suggestions on how communities, governments, and legislators can incorporate the Qur’ānic teachings into real-world projects. It emphasizes the critical role that social justice and equality play in bringing about enduring world peace.

This paper explores the Apostle Paul's teachings on righteousness and justification, emphasizing forensic, covenantal, apocalyptic, and sacramental aspects of his theology. Analysing key passages in Romans and Galatians, it integrates insights from contemporary theologians Douglas Campbell, N.T. Wright, and Pope Benedict XVI. Central to Paul's theology is the concept of justification by faith and the transformative power of divine grace. This study highlights the theological richness of Paul's teachings, while also acknowledging their ecumenical potential. By synthesizing these perspectives, the paper offers a comprehensive understanding of Pauline righteousness and its enduring relevance in contemporary Christian life.

In the last decades the specialists in Descartes’ philosophy have focused on the question whether the nature of the methodical doubt raised in the first meditation must be considered as a systematically rigorous worry or, on the contrary, it corresponds to a trick that performs an instrumental value inside of the approach provided by the author. The hope is that the answer to that question may clarify the process that guides the ‘Meditations’. The interpreters who hold that the methodical doubt is feigned as well as those who think that it must be considered rigorously appeal to a conceptual distinction noted by Descartes itself to validate their respective proposals, namely: the distinction between metaphysical and moral certainty. The present paper proposes that the more suitable interpretation is the one maintained by those who consider the methodical doubt, in certain degree, as genuinely rigorous. To justify our adhesion the paper will evaluate the explanatory capacity of both interpretations, as regars to the progressive order contemplated in the first meditation as well as to the approximation to other philosophical problems contemplated in the ‘Meditations’.

The article is devoted to the problem of attributing monuments of medieval nomads from the Ukrainian steppe in the period of X-XIV centuries on the example of three burials from the Novosilsky Kurgan group located in the North-Western Black Sea coast. The attribution of such burials is problematic for the archaeology of Ukraine. The number of modern studies on this topic is rather small, which is determined by the somewhat biased attitude of scientists towards the monuments of medieval nomads of the 10th-14th centuries as those left by a certain homogeneous community, as evidenced by the still used term „late nomads”. However, such a strong generalization does not reflect reality. During the Middle Ages, the steppe of Ukraine was replaced one after another by waves of multi-ethnic nomads who migrated here from Central Asia. The ethnic diversity of the Pechenegs, Torks, Cumans, and the Central Asian peoples who came with the Mongols, but also their similarities, including the significant similarity of funeral rites, made it difficult to attribute and identify features for certain ethnocultural groups and chronological periods. The purpose of this paper is to trace possible solutions to this problem. Modern technologies can also help with this – namely, 3-D modelling of artefacts from burials, which allows us to learn the detailed parameters of each object and visualize it in high resolution. For this work, three 3-D models were created – one object from each burial site, which will be characterized in the paper. The models also perform an important task of preserving cultural heritage, because unfortunately, since 2014, because of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation, nomadic monuments from the medieval steppe of Ukraine have been destroyed.

This research accumulated a representative source base on the history of military education institutions in Asian Russia in the XIX – early XX centuries. It featured the complex and contradictory processes that accompanied the first years of the Neplyuev military school in the first quarter of the XIX century. The paper introduces a wide source base that includes some previously unstudied documents from the Russian State Military Historical Archive and the Russian State Historical Archive. The author used a systematic approach that combined standard scientific techniques with special chronological, genetic, comparative, and functional historical methods. The paper describes the early years of the military school, i.e., prerequisites, opening, military governors’ contribution, the first teaching staff, financial issues, etc. The military school was unique in its international composition as it accepted sons of the Central Asian nobility. According to the curriculum, foreign languages were one of the main competences to acquire. The school trained not only officers for irregular Cossack troops, but also translators for the Orenburg Border Commission that provided international relations between Russia and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. The school educated the indigenous population and developed its national intelligentsia while consolidating Russian influence in Central Asia. The school was an important step towards the development of the Russian Empire as a Eurasian power. The Orenburg Military School became the most important institution of military education in Asian Russia as it laid foundations for the formation of the local military and teaching personnel.

The paper presents the archaeological sites in the environs of the modern settlement of Bela Cerkev and the results of archaeological excavations in 2002, prior to motorway construction. Excavations at four (?) different, but contiguous locations (Dolge njive, Draga 1, Draga 2 in Draga 3) revealed and documented part of the line of the road, the masonry foundations of buildings, numerous post-built structures, a cemetery and domestic material, dating to the Roman period. The paper also considers hypotheses surrounding the location of the Roman-period roadside settlement of Crucium. It is posited that the excavation on these sites have revealed the location of the Roman roadside settlement of Crucium, which was occcupied or functioned in the period from the 1st to the 4th Centuries AD.

Abstract Tyrant Pericles. Approach to the management of the health crisis during the plague of Athens (430-426 BC) The aim of this paper is to analyse the political and religious consequences of the Athenian plague of 430 BC. Regarding the political aspects, the work is focused on the popular judgement on the epidemic’s management and the consequent Pericles’ loss of political prestige. Moreover, the paper concludes that this popular response leads to the adoption of religious measures such as the introduction in Athens of Asclepius’ cult (421 BC). The facts mentioned above provide an alternative point of view of Thucydides’ epidemic main account.

The paper concerns the contribution given by Calamandrei with the Mexican conferences to the transformative constitutionalism that spread in Latin America. In particular, it dwells on the role of the judge as an engine of social transformation. After a brief introduction on the role of the judge in pre-1944 works, the Author emphasizes the liberal-socialist culture as the matrix of the social justice promised in the Republican Constitution. Secondly, the Author focuses on the inaugural conference of the 1950 International Congress, in which Calamandrei invites us to read the trial in the light of the constitutional principles of the welfare state. The Mexican conferences, in which the judge becomes an engine of social transformation, are then analysed. The paper concludes with an analysis of the legacy of the Mexican conferences in Latin America: the ‘transformative constitutionalism’.

This practise-as-research paper applies Cormac Power’s three categories of presence (2006) to contemporary clown training and performance in the theatre with specific reference to a recently devised performance that used clown principles to open up challenging discussions around shame, race and Afrikaner Identity. Through my perspective as a South African educator, clown practitioner and postdoctoral fellow, I propose that the contemporary clown’s failed efforts to sustain the audience's belief in their persona is what paradoxically leads to the clown’s success by drawing attention to presence as a multibodied phenomenon. Failure, a key principle of clowning, is an effective performance strategy that relies on the performer's awareness of their presence as a dynamic exchange to establish and maintain connection with an audience through listening and reacting to audience appreciation (laughter) or lack thereof (silence). Through critical reflection of the clown as both a state of presence and a performative strategy, this paper highlights the valuable role that the clown’s insider-outsider position plays in bringing about awareness and learning in both theatrical and pedagogic contexts.

The debate on decolonizing monuments has provoked a great deal of covering and shrouding of public sculptures. This paper looks at three examples and shows how textile interventions alter a monument’s visibility and, as products of (post)colonial trade or communal handicraft, add semantic layers. Ranging from The Kudzu Project’s marking of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, VA, through the covering of the Robert Milligan statue by protesters in London, to a curated artwork by Joiri Minaya in Hamburg, the examples span both geographical regions and the recent history of the debate. The paper proposes that textile ephemerality questions concepts of history embedded in the traditional materiality of public sculptures and provides a model for imagining other practices of commemoration.

In this paper, I formulate an alternative to the classical doctrine of divine simplicity. Simply stated, God’s nature is best understood as Holy Triune Love (HTL), and all attributes are best understood as aspects of HTL. This reformulation will allow us to affirm much of the content of classical simplicity without the actus-purus doctrine. This paper will proceed as follows. First, I will define CS and sketch its rationale in God's metaphysical ultimacy. Second, I will defend two critical objections from the incarnation and divine knowledge I take to be decisive against CS. Third, I will sketch HTL in relation to the trinitarian processions and the attributes, showing how HTL best satisfies the doctrinal motivations for CS. Fourth, I will show how HTL responds to the challenges I’ve raised against CS. I will then conclude by answering five potential objections.

This thematic issue collects a selection of the linguistic papers presented during the interdisciplinary conference Parità, genere, disabilità: la prospettiva giuridica e la prospettiva lingui-stica (‘Equality, gender, disability: the legal and linguistic perspective’) held in October 2021 at the University of Milan. The papers deal with the inclusive languages of social sustainability, and in particular, six focus on the topic “language and gender” and one on “language and disability”, mainly in German and Italian and partly in other languages. Both topics are analysed in the standard language and/or in specific domains of use (i. e., legal communication and institutional communication).

This paper presents a case study on the teaching of a 30-hour module of English Linguistics for two courses in the first-cycle degree programme in Modern Cultures and Languages. Data gathered through students’ evaluation forms have been contradictory: the module scored high as far as students’ satisfaction was concerned but it scored low regarding interest. This paper shows how students’ feedback has helped us introduce changes. These are illustrated in the main part of this paper. They engage with pedagogical knowledge, methodologies and practices, as well as linguistic approaches specifically chosen to unpack the potential of the content of the module, improving students’ language awareness and language skills.

This paper examines from a codicological and bibliographical point of view the manuscript M-139 of the Menéndez Pelayo Library (Santander, Spain). The aim is to provide new information on the materiality of the codex while linking the study of the material and content of the manuscript, in order to draw conclusions about its configuration. After the identification of the manuscript, the contents are explained in detail. The material aspects are then dealt with, from the composition and markings of the paper, through the systems of arrangement to a brief paleographic analysis.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), in its manifesto, promised a free and independent media with an autonomous Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) which does not become a tool in the hands of the ruling party (Insaf, 2018). The present study examines the increased control of the PTI government and the military on media outlets, independent journalists, artists, and literary figures around the country. The paper also discusses the rebalancing of power structure and political dynamics in Pakistan, along with the role of presidential ordinances: Pakistan Media Development Authority (PMDA) and amendment to Prevention in Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), which aim to bolster control, curb the narrative, and further limit the freedom of expression. The paper investigates the institutionalization of these draconian regulations whose impact has already started to appear with the confiscation and setting ablaze of Urdu translations of Mohammad Hanif’s novel: A Case of Exploding Mangoes by unknown men in Karachi, a novel which illustrates the historical fictional account of General Zia’s last days as President of Pakistan (Hussain, 2020). Dawn, one of the country’s oldest newspapers, has been banned and denied distribution in army cantonments since 2018. It is hoped that the present study will create awareness regarding this shift of balance towards authoritarianism and provide factual understanding of the country’s current political milieu.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of Spanish and Korean reformulation markers against the backdrop of a contrastive / intercultural rhetoric approach (Kaplan, 1966; Hinds, 1987; Clyne, 1994; Connor, 2008, 2011). In order to carry out the analysis, following a line of previous research papers in Murillo (2007, 2012), an empirical study using Spanish and Korean journalistic corpus was performed. The results obtained demonstrate significant disparity between the use of Spanish and Korean RMs when approached from a linguistic-intercultural rhetoric perspective, more specifically as to the use of double reformulation -the repetition of the Korean markers (jeuk… jeuk… / got… got…)-, some particular rhetorical patterns of the Korean marker got, denoting its cultural idiosyncrasy, and the discourse processes, such as ‘definition’, ‘denomination’, and ‘conclusion’, utilizing the selected markers in the two languages.

This paper explores the prosaic deductive style developed by Melissus and Zeno. It first emphasizes the authors’ use of a systematic and reduced vocabulary solely dedicated to a priori deduction. In a second time, the paper delves into the systematic role of reductio ad absurdum in their reasoning and distinguishes several kinds of reductio employed by the authors. Through this analysis, the study shows how Melissus and Zeno not only developed and systematized certain aspects of Parmenides’ style but also introduced original features that significantly influenced the philosophical writing style.

This paper discusses the 17th-century Latin translation of Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, preserved in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 9871, produced by the Spaniard Vicente Mariner. The author examines the historical context, sources, and motivations behind Mariner’s translation, his intellectual profile, and the potential reasons for translating a mathematical text given his background in literature. Via a comparison of Mariner’s text with the original Greek, this paper delves into Mariner’s translation choices and linguistic nuances to highlight the challenges he faced while translating it. Transcriptions of the collated passage both from Grynaeus’ 1533 editio princeps of Proclus’ text and Mariner’s manuscript are provided in the Appendix. Overall, this paper attempts to shed light on Mariner’s contribution to the Latin reception of Proclus’ work in the early modern period.

Decades of decline, disinvestment, and racism have left Detroit with an abundance of abandoned buildings, ruins, vacant lots, and illicit trash dumps. Though these structures and materials might have forfeited their previous purposes, they can act as catalysts, substances, and co-creators of artworks. The paper is thus interested in examining the intricate interplay between art, space, and materiality in Detroit further. Drawing from the practices of local artists Olayami Dabls and Scott Hocking, the paper adopts a new materialist framework to investigate the dynamic agency of matter in the artistic process. By considering materials as active participants in the production of art and space, the paper seeks to add to the emerging interest in the emancipation and meaning making of material in art as well as cultural geography's engagements with new materialism.

The paper analyses the process of textbook selection and materials adaptation in the context of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses and in the context of English for Nursing course. Textbooks and materials are essential components of ESP course design, which frequently contribute to the success or failure of the course in completing the course objectives. However, the process of selecting a specific textbook for the course, which will address the course objectives, is not straightforward or simple. In the ESP literature, the views about the need of using textbooks in ESP courses are polarised. The study will examine the benefits of using textbooks in ESP context, which include available sources for the students and facilitate the class preparation for the teachers, as well as the drawbacks which include the impossibility of finding a textbook which corresponds entirely to learners’ needs. The research includes the evaluation of the selected textbook in the context of English for Nursing. The evaluation is based on the literature review on the topic of textbook evaluation in ESP and language teaching and learning context in general. The evaluation described is based on the set of criteria provided by Miekley (2005), which includes the following criteria: content, vocabulary and grammar, exercises and activities, attractiveness of the text, the quality of the teacher’s manual and the context. Two textbooks are examined and compared, in order to select the appropriate one. Apart from the textbook analysis, the paper aims to provide suggestions and recommendations regarding materials adaptation and development of materials which can be used in English for Nursing and Medical English Courses.

Irony is a complex linguistic phenomenon that plays an important role in children’s literature. The use of irony in a children’s literary text opens up new possibilities for interpreting the text and also brings about an important change in the level of reception of the work, as it awakens not only the curiosity of the children but also the interest of the adults. The aim of this paper is to examine the forms of irony based on Erich Kästner’s fairy tale “Puss in Boots” and to discuss the role of morphology and syntax in generating irony. A detailed analysis of the morpho-syntactic elements of irony should show that Kästner’s text can be classified in the category of crosswriting. The paper also deals with the writing style of Kästner. Typical of the German author is that he has often made adaptations of famous works of children’s and young people’s literature. “Till Eulenspiegel”, “Münchhausen” and “Die Schildbürger” are adaptations that show that Kästner is interested in works that have the potential to be humorous. Earlier versions of the fairy tale “Puss in Boots” are also briefly mentioned in this paper to illustrate the popularity of the pre-text. Because Kästner’s text is an adaptation of the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, the following important terms are also to be explained: irony, humour and intertextuality. However, the article focuses mainly on the morpho-syntactic peculiarities of Kästner’s adaptation. Different grammatical categories such as modal particles, modal verbs, attributes and punctuation are examined in the paper and this analysis tries to determine to what extent they play a role in the manifestation of irony. Such an analysis opens up new perspectives and possibilities of interpretation of the fairy tale “Puss in Boots” by Kästner.

The aim of this paper is the language analysis of an online-YouTube-interview, where the politeness is defined as a sociocultural entity. In this paper, the most influential theories of politeness are presented and the concept of face is explained. In addition to this, it presents in detail the difference between the positive and negative politeness. The data shows that politeness influences the choice of language means and how the language means can change the communicative situation where the functions of language means in adapting language are illustrated and shown.The results are based on an online-YouTube-interview which is analyzed linguistically by defining and showing the relationship between the participants in the given communication. It also shows how the speakers adapt the politeness forms in relation to the conversation partner. The analysis of the language of the moderator and the guest confirms the assumption that the language is related to the situational context and that the speakers adapt their language depending on the communicative situation, which has been shown by the tendency of the moderator and the interviewed guest to reduce distance, through the use of interpersonal discourse markers as well as other language means.

One of the most important goals of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the target language in everyday situations. Developing lexical competence in foreign language learning can play an important role in achieving this goal. The aim of the present study is to call attention to the importance of teaching collocations in foreign language education. The first part of the paper gives an overview about collocations and collocational competence. In the second part of the paper, I would like to focus on principles of phraseology and foreign language teaching methodology that can be used for teaching collocations in the classroom.

Keen observers of Kenyan English usage will agree that idiomatic expressions such as put into consideration, rather than take into consideration, are certainly common in daily usage. The author of this paper set out to establish if that was indeed the case by having a sample of 122 respondents, all fourth-year university students, to choose between put and take. 77% of them chose put, which suggests that the expression put into consideration is indeed quite familiar to Kenyan English speakers. It was tested alongside another 19 idiomatic expressions. 17 out of the 20 were found to be familiar, though to varying degrees. But this familiarity was not reflected in corpus data from the International Corpus of English and the Corpus of Global Web-based English, where they were found to be rare. The same corpus data showed that this familiarity of the 20 expressions to Kenyan English speakers did not mean that they used them more frequently than their Standard International English counterparts. For example, the data showed that the “less familiar” take into consideration had more tokens in the Kenyan English components of the two corpora than the “more familiar” put into consideration. Nevertheless, the paper concludes that so-called Kenyan English idioms can still be claimed to be typical of Kenyan English, since they are practically absent from e. g. British English, its colonial ancestor.

This paper examines activist subtitling practices in light of the two sociological concepts of narrativity and liminality. With particular focus on online contemporary activist communities that counter extremism, subtitling is studied as part of the cultural liminoid practices that produce and disseminate alternative narratives challenging the rigid frames of global jihadism. Launched as reactions to the repercussions of the Arab Spring and the establishment of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ضايعة الطاسة Daya alTaseh and ذا بيج دادي شوو The Bigh daddy Show are two activist online media initiatives that spread counter-jihadist narratives in Arabic subtitled in English. The study attempts to investigate the narratives mediated in the subtitles and their reflections of liminality. The subtitling in both initiatives is scrutinised and compared using a two-fold theoretical framework combining the socio-narrative theory in translation studies and theories on activist translation. Guided by this framework, the paper applies a descriptive qualitative analysis to data collected from observations and interviews. The data analysis reveals the distinct liminoid stories of Daya alTasehand The Bigh daddy Show as narrated in the English subtitles, pinpointing the similarities and differences between them. User interaction with both initiatives is also highlighted as a contributor to the development of the subtitling process.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The article discusses the interplay between language, cognition and culture from a cognitive diachronic perspective, focusing on the relation between religion and metaphorical thought. It investigates the role of the conceptual metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS LIGHT in religious discourse, using the example of The Revelations of Divine Love, written by Julian of Norwich, a late medieval anchoress. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METODS: The paper draws on the Extended Conceptual Metaphor approach, Zoltán Kövecses’s elaboration of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The universalist bias of CMT means that the theory tends to ignore the sociocultural context of historical data, prioritising the influence of universal human embodiment on metaphorical thought. Using Kövecses’s approach, the paper shows how the gap in CMT methodology may be bridged to yield more reliable results. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The present study connects Kövecses’s approach to Cognitive Linguistic research into sociocultural situatedness. To exemplify the problem, the analysis examines the cognitive‑cultural underpinnings of Julian’s use of the metaphor UNDERSTAND‑ ING IS LIGHT. RESEARCH RESULTS: The analysis shows that the metaphorical conceptualisation pattern may well derive from Julian’s sociocultural situatedness. The paper indicates that the anchoress’s metaphorical thought should be seen as embedded in the late medieval sociocultural context, rather than being considered solely in terms of universal aspects of embodiment. CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND THE APPLICATIVE VALUE OF RESEARCH: The study concludes that the idea of sociocultural situatedness may be pivotal in the analyses of historical texts. It seems important to incorporate this idea into Kövecses’s approach, which may inform the methodology of cognitive diachronic research into metaphorical conceptualisations. Furthermore, the results may be applied to teaching students how to approach historical texts, helping them gain a better understanding of the relation between metaphorical thought and culture.

This paper seeks to argue that truth is not something that relates to telling/speaking only. Its main aim is to show that in their quest for communion with God, other human beings – and one should add – the entire creation, humans need to go beyond truth-telling toward the ways of embodying and dwelling in truth and hope. To introduce its argument, the paper proceeds in the following steps. First, it expounds a Christian perspective on truth, employing notions such as sacrament, desire, and relationality. Through the image of communion with God, a link between truth-telling and hope is outlined. Second, it tries to show that truth-telling is not only an affective but also an existential category. As such, it involves the whole of human being. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to the concept of body and embodiment when reflecting on the human pursuits of truth. The paper then, third, examines various constellations of this central claim by exploring a specific case from popular culture, namely, ‘Crocodile’, an episode from the Netflix series, Black Mirror. In particular, a proposal is made for the significance of embodying and dwelling in truth for Christian theology and practice. Finally, in the last step, this embodying and dwelling is given more concrete contours with respect to hope by probing into the images of home and feast.

Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. While politics and conflicts over accessing land for renewables are well documented, the role, conditions and potential agency of landownership have been often overlooked or oversimplified as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as a mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of wind energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetisation and value grabbing by landowners. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing and wider processes of capital accumulation through renewables. We draw on insights from the Netherlands and Scotland to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions, and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community wind energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.

This paper examines early language learning (ELL) in Croatia, drawing context from broader European policies, recommendations, and research. It explores Croatia’s tradition, research, and practices in ELL within early childhood education and care institutions. The core analysis focuses on data from 2008 to 2023, examining foreign language programs in Croatian kindergartens (KGs). This includes the number of KGs offering programs, the languages available, and children’s participation. The research reveals a growing interest in early language exposure throughout Croatia. By analyzing trends over 14 years, the paper establishes how program offerings and participation rates have evolved. These findings offer valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and researchers in the field of ELL. Additionally, the research discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing effective early language learning programs in Croatia.

The 14th-century Dominican theologian and philosopher Durand of Saint-Pourçain was among the intellectuals who took part in the medieval debate on virginity, especially on the relationship between virginity and marriage. This paper discusses a question of his Sentences Commentary (Super Sent., II, d. 20, q. 2), in which Durand poses the question of “whether or not there would have been a loss of virginity in marriage” (utrum in actu matrimoniali fuisset amissio virginitatis) both in statu innocentiae and in statu post peccatum. This paper shows how Durand’s solution to the problem is in opposition to Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’s views, based on formal and material aspects of virginity.

In this paper, I attempt to explore a recent hypothesis about what the main mss. are for establishing the text of Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (henceforth EN). This hypothesis was recently advanced on the basis of evidence coming from EN I-II. In exploring this hypothesis, I confine myself to the text of EN X.6-9 [=Bywater X.6-8], and, as a result, I propose a new text for EN X.6-9 [=Bywater X.6-8] based on a fresh collation of nine mss—four of which were not taken into account in previous editions of the EN—and based on readings that can be gathered from the Arabic translation of the EN that was preserved in the Fez ms. The text proposed in this paper is accompanied by textual notes that justify my decisions regarding some difficult passages.

The horrific scenes of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), which left the country in ruins, had a traumatic effect on the entire nation particularly the Lebanese author, Hanan al-Shaykh who was haunted by the nightmarish war memories until she managed to overcome them by reliving the whole experience through the events of her remarkable novel The Story of Zahra. Disillusioned by the political scene during the war and exasperated with the traditional artistic themes advocated by previous generations of war writers, al-Shaykh rejected the linear development of character, the sense of order and progression integral to the war literature in the Arab world. Instead, she captures the atrocities of war by creating a unique novel, giving the Lebanese tragedy mythic proportions and turning it into more than a historical event. In light of this background and within the context of contemporary war fiction studies, the paper critically examines al-Shaykh’s novel in order to explore the deadly impact of war, which uproots the foundations of a civilized country turning it into a wasteland. The paper argues that the author creates a multi-layered narrative, which reflects the collapse of the moral and political structure of a patriarchal society paralyzed by coercive masculinity and devastated by sectarian violence. Navigating the protagonist’s journey of suffering and pain during the brutal civil conflict, the paper uncovers the underpinnings of war interpreting the novel as a gendered reflection of a divided country. The paper also emphasizes that the author presents a counter-narrative exposing the ugly side of war and revealing how war catastrophically damages the social fabric of the nation.

The paper focuses on a reexamination and reassessment of the textual evidence of Enoch’s Vision of the Heavenly Temple and of its classical interpretation as a heavenly temple complex. In line with the common scholarly opinion, 1 En. 14:8–25 has so far been interpreted in the sense of a bipartite or even tripartite temple which resembles the earthly temple in Jerusalem not only in structure but also in appearance. In contrast, this paper claims that this passage of the Book of the Watchers provides a twofold vision of two different temples, namely the inferior earthly temple and the ideal heavenly sanctuary. In this way, it articulates one of the most radical temple critiques of ancient Judaism. This interpretation is based on a careful textual analysis and a meticulous discussion of the individual elements of, in particular, the first house, taking into account other ancient Jewish sources such as Ezekiel, Haggai and the Animal Apocalypse which partially have been ignored so far but provide a helpful and illuminating background for the interpretation of Enoch’s Heavenly Vision.

Casualties of nuclear technologies are not immediate, and the populations that bear the most significant burden are too sparse to be noteworthy, especially in the case of uranium mining industries. Shaped by forms of settler colonialism – the US and Canada mine on Indigenous and First Nation reservations – effects of radioactive exposure produce slow, recursive forms of nuclear suffering as illness may take up to thirty years to manifest. This article zooms in on the case of uranium mining and the violence of the temporal lag between uranium exposure and the appearance of symptoms. It explores how this lag is critically interrogated by two contemporary artists that approach uranium mining histories as unresolved; as a series of situations whose unfolding goes on, thus going against the closure of narratives of uranium mining. Two artworks that critically engage with the slow temporality of uranium and its violent effects, and that this paper closely reads, are Bonnie Devine’s drawing series The Book of Radiance (1999) and video Rooster Rock, the Story of Serpent River and Eve Andrée Laramée’s installation Halfway to Invisible (2009). Both artists lay bare the temporal possibilities of turning our gaze away from obvious nuclear symbols, such as bombs and reactors, or what technology historian Gabrielle Hecht calls our fetishes of nuclear histories (Being Nuclear. Africans and the Global Uranium Trade), to rather engage with less obvious nuclear histories. Drawing on theoretical insights from recent scholarship in science and technology studies and art history around time, the paper emphasizes the affordances of contemporary art in redressing uranium mining as a slow and latent modality of the nuclear complex.

How did the exhibition in the Chinese pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale entitled Continuum – Generation by Generation (buxi 不息) mobilize the concept of buxi, which translates literally as “endlessness” or “never ceasing”? What does it mean to conceive of art, the world, and oneself through the lens of buxi, as endlessly intrarelated? This paper delves into this question from a multi-pronged perspective. First, it explains the meaning of buxi and analyzes how the show engages with aesthetic, epistemological, social and political implications of art and the world conceived through a contemporary perspective on the concept of “endlessness”. Second, the paper explores how a reading of the show and the artworks – their adopted aesthetic strategies, media, techniques, and materialities – through the lens of buxi complicates the critical and aesthetic framework for contemporary art in the global context. Finally, the paper evaluates the engagement with buxi – and the respective alternative processual ontology and temporality of art and world – as a useful mode of decolonizing the discipline of art history, even as it emphasizes the importance of adopting a dynamic pluriversal approach that attends to the transcultural relations that shape and reshape the multiplicity of meanings of art in a global framework, its multiple and entangled critical and aesthetic discourses, and the complexity of power structures, and avoids obscuring significant contexts and experiences.

This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

The dynamic secularisation of Polish young people and the fact that many of them are opt­ing out of religious classes prompts a critical analysis of the current model of Religious Education and the development of proposals that respond to contemporary socio-cultural challenges. In others words this article will seek to outline potential directions for modifying the current Religious Education model intended for secondary school students in Poland. This paper attempts to provide a synthetic answer to the following questions: Why is Religious Education in secondary schools today not leading to the expected results? What elements of it are inadequate for contemporary conditions? What should the model of Religious Education for young people look like in the context of a decline in religiousness? Where and how should catechesis be provided? This paper contributes to the discussion on the shape of Religious Education for young people in a changing society.

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

In the introductory article to this special issue, the two editors first provide a brief insight into how it arose and then give an overview of the contents of the individual papers, all of which are dedicated to phraseography or metaphraseography. These two fields of linguistic research belong to both phraseology and (meta-)lexicography and deal with the inclusion of phrasemes in dictionaries and the corresponding practical and theoretical issues. The articles also have in common that they focus on various diatopic Romance varieties spoken in Italy (Genoese, Trentino, Piedmontese, Tuscan, regional Italian of Rome, Sardinian, Catalan of Alghero), Croatia (Istriot), Spain and Latin America (regional varieties of Spanish). Since the term phraseme is used in a broad sense in this publication, numerous different phraseological categories are discussed in the papers, including, for example, syntagmatic verbs and partially lexically filled constructions, in addition to more classical categories such as idioms, proverbs and collocations. Finally, it will be briefly argued why this special issue, which is inspired by the two research projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, can be regarded as particularly innovative.

Digression is a discourse function that is identifiable and distinct from other similar functional strategies, and varies cross-linguistically. This paper investigates the way speakers of Spanish and English digress from their main discourse topics and how these transitions are marked. Once digression is defined by the proposal of four features considered to be inherent in this concept, the paper focuses on so-called 'digression formulating phrases', recurrent expressions which make explicit reference to the digression and signal that a new direction with respect to topic is proposed. The paper thus adopts a less common than the usual approach to discourse coherence and digression, whose literature has largely focused on discourse markers. The dataset, extracted from a corpus of parliamentary discourse, is analysed in an attempt to address two research questions. I investigate, first, the frequency and distribution of the selected digression formulating phrases in the two languages, and discern which of the two contexts of digression (i.e. beginnings and ends) is more highly marked, and, second, their use in connection to aspects such as syntactic configuration and position, and co-occurring features of semantic and pragmatic meaning. The contrastive perspective adds precision and richness to the treatment of digression.

This paper investigates the impact of source text readability on the effort of post-editing English-Chinese Neural Machine Translation (NMT) output. Six readability formulas, including both traditional and newer ones, were employed to measure readability, and their predictive power towards post-editing effort was evaluated. Keystroke logging, self-report questionnaires, and retrospective protocols were applied to collect the data of post-editing for general text type from thirty-four student translators. The results reveal that: 1) readability has a significant yet weak effect on cognitive effort, while its impact on temporal and technical effort is less pronounced; 2) high NMT quality may alleviate the effect of readability; 3) readability formulas have the ability to predict post-editing effort to a certain extent, and newer formulas such as the Crowdsourced Algorithm of Reading Comprehension (CAREC) outperformed traditional formulas in most cases. Apart from readability formulas, the study shows that some fine-grained reading-related linguistic features are good predictors of post-editing time. Finally, this paper provides implications for automatic effort estimation in the translation industry.

This paper draws on current discussions in digital geography that emphasize the political and theoretical role of glitches. While we sympathize with the basic assumptions of this discussion and also find it helpful to connect these to older discussions around digital infrastructures, we propose an opposing perspective with this text. Using the example of Internet infrastructures, we focus on the continuous and painstaking work of making infrastructures invisible and preventing glitches. We are particularly interested in the production of resilience and focus from a geographical perspective on the rationalities of redundancy and addressing latency.

Spirit Christology has resonated within Anglican, Protestant, and Catholic theology. This is due to several limits of the traditional approach based on the formula of Chalcedon which have been highlighted since the 18th century. Entangling Christology and Pneumatology is regarded a promising solution to the notorious problem of explaining the person of Jesus Christ. In this paper, both the intentions and the challenges of Spirit Christology are being displayed. An important aspect will be to differentiate between two types of Spirit Christology: first, attempts to deepen and enrich the understanding of the traditional approach, and second, attempts to replace it. In recent theological discourse, both views are being expressed.

This article focuses on the almost unknown novel Ben Ammar de Sevilla. Una tragedia en la España de los taifas, written by the famous medievalist Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (d. 1984), who while paradoxically contributing greatly for the knowledge on the Muslim Iberia and its historiography, at the same time consolidated the 19th century discourses of the Reconquista and the «Hispanized» al-Andalus. The aim of this article is to study, on the one hand, how al-Andalus is depicted on Sánchez-Albornoz’s novel, and, on the other, to interpret why he wrote this book and how it blends with his general way of thinking the history of Spain and his own present. The paper argues that this novel must be read through Sánchez-Albornoz’s experience of civil war and exile, in which the problem of the unity of the Spanish people throughout its history becomes crucial in his historical thought. The Taifa period, in which the novel focuses, and the consequences of the fitna and disintegration of the Andalusi unity, are a mirror in which Sánchez-Albornoz reflects his own reality and his patriotic longings. Thus, the main characters of his novel, such as the exiled king of Seville al-Mu‘tamid, become (in)direct parallels of the author’s life. Ideas such as that of the homo hispanus, the concern for union and the avoidance of the fitna are fundamental for a global understanding of Sánchez-Albornoz’s historical proposal. These perspectives can explain the apparent contradictions in his approach on the history of al-Andalus, and can also explain how the Middle Ages consisted of a way to address his own present.

The metropolitan rootedness of urban studies has been under critique for more than 2 decades. The call for more studies from “elsewhere” and theorization from “outside” the North Atlantic circuits of knowledge production has changed the landscape of urban theory. However, the genius loci of this urban theory still lies in the metropolis (centre of power and knowledge). One key reason for this metropolitan locatedness is the lack of attention paid to geo- and bio-politics of knowledge which separates/excludes the ontological location of the researchers from research practice. This separation/exclusion allows a research practice wherein data are produced from the field, theorization happens elsewhere, and the researcher manages this process (as objectively as possible). This schema evades the locationality of research questions/concerns, as to where they come from, and how the ontological location of the researcher produces them. This paper discusses the need to recentre the researcher to evade what allegorically becomes “research without researchers”.

According to Heidegger in his private writings of the 1930s-40s, contemporary humankind has become incapable of experience (Erfahrung). It can relate to beings (Seienden), but it fails to have an authentic experience of Being (Seyn), which acts as the foundation of every possible ontological experience. In this paper, we would like to reconstruct the thesis of an impossibility of experience, as we can find it in the writings from the posthumous legacy, recently published and less studied. Our aim is to show that this historical interpretation, which has exerted so much influence on the philosophy of the 20th century, cannot be interpreted radically nor without limits. If we do so, we take the risk to be left without a phenomenological ground capable of accounting for our experience –in any of its determinations. Heidegger exposes a historical impasse, where the tendency is that we only have experience of beings in its present and effective determination (Wirklichkeit). However, if we accept that it is only from an experience of Being that all other experiences can be considered, then we close our eyes to the first phenomenological fact of the givenness of life –which Heidegger himself defended in his early courses.

In this paper, we argue that the Jonasian turn undergone by the Varelian autopoietic theory, which was intended to include a teleological complement to autopoiesis, can be replaced by the phenomenology of biology in the German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, which, unlike the Jonasian one, does not include anthropocentric existential assumptions in the consideration of living beings. The argument unfolds in four steps: a) first, we will develop the fundamental elements of the classical version of the autopoietic theory, elaborated by Maturana and Varela in the ‘70s, which, among other things, is decidedly anti-teleological; b) then, we will show that years later, Varela turns towards teleology in the so-called Jonasian turn, including within the autopoietic theory elements of existential phenomenology; c) subsequently, we will develop some of the most relevant arguments of Plessnerian biological phenomenology, especially those arguments in relation to the concept of positionality and which serve for this complementarity between the autopoietic and Plessnerian positions; d) finally, we will conclude that the autopoietic theory, due to the accusations it receives for having turned towards an existentialist philosophy, can migrate towards the Plessnerian biological phenomenology, which does not suffer from the anthropocentric problems attributed to the Jonasian phenomenology.

This paper proposes to critically review Judith Butler's conceptualization of performativity from 1990-2015. In these years Butler proposes to extend the scope of J. L Austin’s concept towards gender theory, replacing Austin's speech act analytic with a post-structural analytic of power. Butler critically uses the reference to poststructuralism and French feminism to reinterpret the Aristotelian conception of the intelligibility of power as the materialization of a discursive form, subordinating to it the scope of performativity. Noting that this influence is absent in Austin's theoretical and analytical grounding of the concept, we will finally contrast the scope and limitations of Butler facing Austin.