Search

The following article deals with the current situation of the Sorbs – a Slavic ethnic group leaving in Lusatia, which is a region belonging to former East Germany. The development of this ethnic group – starting from the end of the 19th Century and considering both Nazi times and former East Germany situation – will be shown. The article discusses on the one hand the attempts to maintain the Sorbian language, among others due to the activities of the Language Centre WITAJ, and on the other hand it stresses the consequences of the brown coal mining in the region of Lusatia. In addition, the attitudeof German natives towards the Sorbs is analysed. On basis of the own research conducted by the author in the year 2010 near the Sorbian town Slepo (ger. Schleife), dilemmas of the local people, who feel dependent on energy concern Vattenfall, are shown. Although the concern guarantees work places, it also jeopardizes the existence of local people’s houses and the cultivation of the Sorbian tradition. The coal mines destroy the natural and social environment. More and more villages are demolished and social networks are being broken by people’s displacements. The current situation makes the Sorbs even more cautious about their own culture and motivates them to fight for their cultural survival.

Georg Brandes’ lecture series on The Main Tendencies in 19th Century Literature was initiated in 1871 and consists of a number of innovative interpretations of European literature. Brandes’ interpretations exemplify his interest in the ideals of the Enlightenment: knowledge, liberation, progress and free thought. The lecture series traces a dialectical movement in European literature, described by Brandes as a dialectics between revolution and liberalism on one hand and conservatism and reactionary tendencies on the other. Brandes includes a dialectics between home, i.e. Danishness, and the ‘foreign’; he opens up a dialogue between nationalism and internationalism with the intention of almost literally placing Europe in Denmark and vice versa. The future was going to be realized in the present. Georg Brandes tried to persuade the young writers of Scandinavia to adopt liberalism and naturalism in their novels and dramas, which some of them proceeded to do, convinced as they were that Brandes’ ideas regarding a new ‘debate’, moral and political, in literature, were right. However, they failed to implement these ideas as we can see by a reading of, for example, Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (1880); Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886) and Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per (1898–1904). Emanicipating the mind and liberating oneself from the reactionary forces of society turned out to be too difficult for the women and men of what Brandes himself referred to as The Modern Breakthrough. Looking at Brandes today we may conclude that he was ahead of his own time as well as ahead of ours. His ideas regarding a new internationalism and liberalism are far from being realized.

The aim of this article is to analyze the Swedish gender equality politics and its influence on the gender equality on the Swedish labour market and within families in period between 1970s and 2000s. Problems such as wage differentials, occupational sex segregation and unequal distribution of paid and unpaid work between the sexes were faced from the beginning of the 20th century up to 1960s. In order to address those issues gender equality politics was launched in 1970s including enacting of the law on separate taxation and law on gender equality. Moreover, a special family politics was launched encouraging men and women to divide childcare and housework equally. On one hand Swedish gender equality politics contributed to the growth of women’s participation in labour market, to minimize wage differentials and it also made sex distribution between the occupations and at the leading positions in companies and institutions more equal. Moreover, this politics led to more equal distribution of unpaid work between men and women at home. On the other hand it must be pointed out that none of these problems has been completely solved. Women’s wages are still generally lower than men’s and women and men tend to work in different sectors. Women still take greater part of parental leave and tend to do the bigger part of unpaid work. Although a significant change in the level of gender equality has been made since 1960s, which can be considered a success of the Swedish gender equality politics, there is still much that needs to be done in order to achieve gender equality both on labour market and in families.

The main subject of the article is a subjective vision of the Lemkos minority representatives on the future of this community, plotted from the perspective of contemporary times, based on personal experiences, thoughts and fears of Lemkos. The article is based on research among Lemkos community initiated in 2007 and finalized in 2009–2010. The study was particularly designed to clarify whether and how the Lemkos are able to build and protect their culture and tradition; how the Lemkos define their view and the most important elements that make up the multidimensional sense of cultural identity. The study was carried out using biographical interviews (IDI), and partly standardized. Author of the article, as a member of the Lemkos community, analyzes the Lemkos community from the perspective. Conclusions concern only specific group of interviewed people, so that can not be generalized to the entire Lemkos minority.

This article tackles the issue of “hyphenated identities” in Heidi W. Durrow’s novel The girl who fell from the sky (2010), whose main topic is growing up as a girl of mixed race in a dominant black culture. This article examines how Rachel Morse, the main character in the novel, challenges racism and the essentialist notion of identity. Firstly, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy’s approaches to that issue are introduced and discussed. Then in relation to their theories an interpretation of Durrow’s

Among the medieval, mostly anonymous, works, the runic inscriptions from the Swedish province Uppland are surprisingly frequently signed with the author’s name. The runic masters (Swedish runristare), the first Scandinavian authors known by name, have been the focus of academic interest since Otto von Friesen’s (1913, 1933) and Erik Brate’s (1925) publications, with new findings published more recently (Thompson 1975, Philippa 1977, Quak 1978, Crocker 1982, Åhlén 1997, Källström 1999 i 2007). The present article is a short presentation of the signature types used by the runic masters from Uppland in the 11th and 12th century and of the most important members of the possible runic guild of that time. A typology of signatures concerning the type of work done on the inscriptions is given (different activities conducted by different people suggest that the preparation of an inscription was a collective rather than individual work). At the same, the comparison between the older and the more recent signed inscriptions suggests that the runic alphabet has evolved from a magical to a common tool. Also, three most eminent runic masters, Ulf of Borresta, Öpir and Åsmund Kåresson, and their inscriptions are presented in the text.

The paper analyses the concept of politeness in the context of Norwegian everyday conversation. Instead of following the widely accepted concept of universality of politeness structures, it refers the theoretical background for considering politeness as realising culturally preconditioned communication patterns. Such patterns consist both of adequate face work, and of obligations connected to speaker/listener role, the latter realised through the system of adjacency pairs. The basic rules prevailing in Norwegian conversations are discussed, such as maintaining a clear and harmonious fl ow of talk or non-imposing on one’s conversational partner. These rules are exemplified on extracts from interethnic dialogues between Poles using Norwegian as a second language, and native speakers of Norwegian. The conclusions of the paper are twofold; it calls for the concept of politeness to be considered on the broader level of discourse rather than the level of single speech acts. Additionally, it stresses the role of ethnic communication pattern in second/foreign language teaching. The realisation of communication patterns allows for a legitimate participation in conversation, which in turn is vital for a successful construction of identity in second/foreign language.

Just within sixteen years since its emergence the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) has reached the status of the third biggest political party in Denmark. Gaining such considerable voter’s support by a new far-right, populist party in Denmark, a country having a reputation of a stable, well-established democracy provokes a broader analysis of this phenomenon. The main goal of the paper is therefore to fi nd an answer to the question about possible factors that have contributed to the popularity of the new far-right in Denmark. In the paper I make an effort to prove that an essential influence on the popularity of the new far-right has the culture clash. I analyse the term culture clash on two planes – as a clash of the ideas of postmaterialism with the traditional sociocultural values and as a clash between Western culture and the values represented by immigrants coming to Denmark from mostly muslim countries.

The article is devoted to the preliminary analysis of biographical interviews, taken with representatives of Crimean Tatars returning to Crimean Peninsula and settling in the places that they or their ancestors used to live before deportation. The research was conducted in summer of 2008 and 2009, 20 interviews were taken with consideration of age, sex, place of living and level of education. Traces of memory are understood in this article as repeatable elements of biographical narratives. By this virtue those repeated elements refer not only to individual identity but they also build collective identity, more precisely national in this case. The key element of the article is the third part of it where relations between memory and identity are explored in collected biographies. As it appeared in all life-stories deportation from Crimea and return after years are crucial elements of construction of biographies and in all cases it has a form of trajectories. The general conclusion is that memory of these painful events and celebration of it is functional for building the strong collective identity which is based on traditional values, religious and political integration of national minority.

After the Greek civil war in the late 1940s and early 1950s around 15,000 communist partisans were brought to Poland and granted the status of political refugees. Most lived in Poland through the late 1970s, when returning to Greece became a possibility. The article analyzes political preferences of the children of partisans(persons born in the 1950s of two Greek parents). I propose possible factors explaining variation in the political affinities of my subjects, such as perception of family background and history, integration with Polish society, decisions regarding returning (or not) to Greece in the late 1970s, and their relation to assessment of the legacy of communist Poland.

The article deals with one of the main streams in Danish contemporary literature, namely the realistic minimalism. Minimalism appeared in Danish contemporary literature at the beginning of the 1990-ties. It was developed by the first generation of writers, who graduated at that time from The Danish School of Writers (Forfatterskolen), founded in 1987 in Copenhagen by the Danish modernist poet and literary critic Poul Borum. The first graduates from The Danish School of Writers wrote mainly short stories, characterized by economy of words and focus on surface description. Due to their form as well as subject matter the works written by Danish minimalists are often called for snapshots of everyday life in nowadays Denmark. Soon after that great outburst of minimalism in Danish literature from the early 90’ties the critics proclaimed the so-called “return to reality” in Danish contemporary literature. Owing to that remarkable phenomenon minimalist literature composed by Danish contemporary writers is often described as a renewed version of realism, whose roots go back to the 70-ties and the 80-ties of the 19th century. The present article gives a brief characteristics of the main features typical of the Danish minimalist realism, which have been discussed in the light of the first wave of realistic literature that came to Denmark in the second half of 19th century. In this way the author compares two related, but though different literary techniques practised by the two generations of Danish realists: the contemporary on the one hand, among whom the author mentions such names as Christina Hesselholdt, Helle Helle and Solvej Balle, as well as their forefathers on the other, where the author respectively refers to Herman Bang, Jens Peter Jacobsen and Henrik Pontoppidan. On the basis of this comparison the author seeks to point out the similarities and the differences between the two series of literary accounts of the Danish reality with regard to their genre specification, form, language and themes. Finally, the author considers the role of minimalism in the contemporary Danish literature and mentions some possible sources of the great interest that minimalist literature still enjoys in Denmark.

The paper A Dane writes about Chopin. Peer Hultberg’s “Preludes” as an example of a contemporary Danish biographical novel concerns the condition of a contemporary Danish biographical novel. The main focus is put on Peer Hultberg’s work Preludes on the famous Polish composer, Fryderyk Chopin. The author of the paper uses the definition of a biographical novel as Maria Jasinska understands it, and the definition of a modernist literary novel by Stephen J. Walton. The article also addresses other contemporary biographical novels written in Scandinavia. Its main aim is to examine in what respects Hultberg’s novel deviates from the standards of a modernist biographical novel. The research is based on four criteria: focus put on one character, chronological structure of the narration, including all life stages, presence of the milestones in the protagonist’s professional career and appearance of authentic characters in the novel’s plot. As it turns out, Preludes hardly fulfills any of the above-mentioned requirements. Although the protagonist is clearly defined, the polyphonic structure of the narration makes it difficult to focus on one character only. The chronological composition is present, but the plot does not include any of the milestones in the composer’s career, since the novel only concerns his childhood. As to authentic characters, they play a peripheral role in the novel’s plot. One can therefore assume that Peer Hultberg’s Preludes is a postmodernist biographical novel, where a fragment replaces the whole, and one stage of life, namely childhood, is capable of telling a story of the origin of genius.

This article examines a tetralogy about the Swedish emigration to North America during the second half of the 19th century, written by Vilhelm Moberg. The tetralogy consists of the following volumes: “The Emigrants”, “Unto a Good Land”, “The Settlers”, and “The Last Letter Home” (only the first two, “The Emigrants” and “Unto a Good Land” have been published in Polish). I present the lives of the

Movements of Scandinavians in period between late 8th AD to middle of 11th AD, called Viking Age, were combined military actions-piracy – and migrations with goal to colonize territories in the West Europe – mainly Insular world of Atlantic and British isles, but also in East Europe, among Finno-Ugrians and Slavs. This activity is seen as the recent, and last, of the Migration Period, the time of great movements of Germanic people in the 4th century AD.

At the beginning of 2010 the culture editor of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten called the Norwegian television NRK “the best public service broadcaster in the world” and „the biggest and most important Norwegian cultural institution”. The article is an attempt to verify this statement through identifying the place of cultural programmes in NRK schedule in 2009. The author analyses how the cultural mission is described in current legal documents concerning Norwegian public service media mission. Furthermore the article is an attempt to identify how NRK defines cultural programmes and how it classifies them. In the second part of the article the author analyses the television programme of NRK1 and NRK2 in 2009, and presents the results of a more detailed analysis of selected three weeks of that year concerning the execution of its cultural mission.

Icelandic cinema has received considerable international attention in recent years. Numerous films have garnered awards at film festivals and subsequently been distributed far and wide – even critics and scholars have begun to take notice. This article approaches an altogether different Icelandic cinema. One that not only dates much further back in time, but also one whose ambitions were inherently national and devoid of global aspirations– although an important exception is discussed in the essay as well. Divided into two parts; the former addresses films of documentary nature, tracing a thread from the oldest extant film to so-called “Iceland-films”, which developed during the interwar era into the first local films directed at foreign audiences, while the latter follows the trajectory of narrative films leading up to the instigation of the Icelandic Film Fund in 1978 (heralding Icelandic cinema’s modern phase), but conversely expressed at no point any interest in foreign appreciations. Remarkably, the key figures of both documentary filmmaking and that of narrative feature filmmaking were the same: Loftur Guðmundsson and Óskar Gíslason. The essay addresses their authorship in terms of both subject matters and film style during a period extending from 1923 to 1954. These were times of dramatic upheaval in Iceland (as obviously most anywhere else) that included the instigation of the Republic in 1944, modernization and urbanization, and the essay offers ample evidence on how these influenced the filmmaking of the era. Theoretically, the essay draws upon the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer amongst others in drawing out the film medium’s specificity – not least its affinities with the past. In this, it also offers some ideas on the nature of cinema with a broad applicability despite dealing specifically with a little known period of a little known national cinema.

Migration, living in another country exposes one to culture contact and initiates the integration process. The integration of migrants is usually discussed using an acculturation model in the form proposed for example by John Berry. Instead, in this article, I take the concept of intercultural communication as it better renders integration as a dynamic practice of reconstructing and redefining culture forms in the culturally diverse environment, where different lifestyles and values coexist. Importantly, as I try to show, taking the example of Polish migrants in Iceland, changing patterns of celebrations are not only influenced by the receiving culture but also by global images.

After 1995, and especially since 2004, there has been an increase in the number of Norwegian fiction books published in Poland. The first part of the paper presents detailed statistical data for this trend and analyses it shortly. The second part is an attempt to introduce the most important trends in contemporary Norwegian literature and indicate how these are reflected in the offer in the Polish book market. The increased popularity of Norwegian fiction in Poland may be a result of the readers’ preferences, but on the other hand also of the general interest in Norway and, not less importantly, the availability of subsidies for literary translations. The books published in Poland in 1995–2010 reflect very well the most characteristic trends in contemporary Norwegian literature. One can find among them examples of both minimalism (including naivism) and encyclopaedism, while the most typical subject areas include family relations, existential problems and religion. Biographies and autobiographies that recently have been a crucial and much-discussed group of literary production in Norway are less represented. The phenomenon of popular literature – the new heyday of the romantic novel series as well as the fashion for Scandinavian crime fiction – is also noteworthy. In addition, some valuable Norwegian books for children and youth were translated into Polish and published in the period. On the whole, it should be emphasised that the situation of Norwegian fiction in Poland is very good; it is undoubtedly one of the best represented minor European literatures in the Polish market.

The article presents the utopian novel, Niels Klim’s underground journey, written by Ludvig Holberg, an 18thcentury Norwegian-Danish scholar and writer. The Holbergian text deals with several topics typical of the literary discourse of that period: religious tolerance, egalitarianism, the desire for power, and also the encounter between naturalness and non-naturalness, familiarity and foreignness, reality and fantasy. Our attention is drawn to the views on social equality between men and women as they are expressed in the novel. Although Holberg has a dualistic vision of the world, and the opposition between the masculine element and the feminine element is very clear in his texts, his ideas seem to be progressive in contrast with the main-stream ideology of the period. According to him, possessing masculine characteristics – meaning socially desirable ones – (e.g. being reasonable, brave or self-controlled) or possessing the opposite, feminine characteristics is not biologically determined. Rather, it is the result of several not always proper social processes such as upbringing and education. It has nothing to do with nature.

The road movie is a genre associated with the American counterculture breakthrough of the late sixties, which both criticised the „American way of life” and in a sophisticated way also strengthened the capitalistic system. Icelandic road movie uses the semantics and syntactic known from the American productions by combining them with national and transnational components. Marked by irony, the postmodern perspective of such movies as Júlíus Kemp’s Blossi/810551, Fridrik Fridriksson’s Cold Fever and Sólveig Anspach’s Back Soon may be read as a visual invitation to get acquainted with the touristic utopian image of Iceland. However, the close reading of these productions can also indicate that they may be regarded as cultural texts that attempt to deconstruct the inauthentic images of the utopian island.

The article examines the case of integration policy implemented in contemporary Sweden. The model has evolved from the 1960s undergoing a large number of transformations dictated by factors such as demographics, labor market structure, public sentiments towards foreigners, the concepts of economic development, political system, domestic politics and foreign policy of the Kingdom of Sweden. The focus has been directed on the constructing process of a cohesive society made up of groups with different ethnic, national, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds.

Along with changes taking place in the modern Nordic societies there is a change in values that have constituted a foundation of the development of higher education systems in this part of Europe. The author’s intention is to investigate to what extent the traditional values that had evolved within the framework of the peasant and industrial societies have a chance to survive, or have to change, within the knowledge-based post-industrial regime. The paper presents an image of the current societal change and investigates whether we currently witness an evolution or withering away of the traditionally Nordic values in higher education. A particular attention is paid to the changes in the social democratic model of education and research and the emergence of neoliberal elements in it. The changes are illustrated by examples of the transition taking place from industrial to post-industrial society, from collectivism to individualism and from egalitarianism to elitism.

Migration of Polish citizens in recent times is a very current issue. In my article I want to explain this highly sophisticated phenomenon on the example of Polish migration to Norway. The scope of my research includes the last two hundred years, during which it has been possible to observe a few different, in the genesis, waves of migration – the nineteenth century (the Polish insurgents and the Polish Jews), WWII (soldiers and forced laborers), and both the political from 1980’s and the largest, economic migration after the Polish accession to the European Union in 2004. The main issue the article focuses on is the style and quality of life of the Poles, who voluntarily or forced by the circumstances, settled in Norway. The article also focuses on cultural confrontation, which automatically followed that migration, often accompanied by acculturation, contrculturation, transculturation or cultural integration. Among other subjects raised in the article there are also the reasons causing the present high migratory activity of the Poles, the largest group of foreigners living in Norway today.

In the text “Genre in relation to sacrum. Crisis of faith, horror and pop culture” Samuel Nowak and Anna Taszycka ponder over the phenomenon of modern horror raising the subject of sacrum, especially in relation to the motive of possession and exorcism. The authors attempt to prove that the phenomenon is symptomatic for the transition from religiousness, understood in institutional and collective terms, to individual and contemplative spirituality. After analysing selected films from the perspective of “spirituality” (in the meaning given to it by Zbigniew Pasek) the authors conclude that today the pop cultural narrations which depict the new function of sacrum and shift the load from institution to an individual may become successful and accepted by viewers.According to the authors the traditional narration – which associates sacrum with a religious experience – is supplanted today by stories which treat sacrum rather in terms of a spiritual experience. This transformation leads to many possible alternative interpretations of selected films which in this text were described in categories of pensiveness or meta-interpretation.

This is an exercise in the fi eld of a sociology of sociology. It draws upon the debate on „sociological theory we need” at the beginning of the 21st century, which was held at the Lisbon 2009 Conference of the European Sociological Association (semi-plenary session). The invited speakers presented two cases of the „theory we need”: „sociology of individuals” and „critical theory”. The author analyses theoretical discussions held at recent big (European and „global”) sociological congresses and comes to the conclusion that the Lisbon 2009 diagnosis of what is really important in sociological theorizing was wrong. Similarly, in Polish textbooks and readers in the fi eld of sociological theory, these two subdisciplines do not seem to be very signifi cant. The detailed discussion of the proposed in Lisbon „sociology of individuals” and „critical theory” follows. In concluding chapter of the article, the author analysis what and why is considered in recent Poland, at the beginning of the 21st century, a „sociology of individuals” and critical sociology” of the post communist transformation.

The text discusses results of a research conducted on behalf of ‘I-Woman’ Foundation (Fundacja Ja Kobieta) on the elderly people loneliness phenomenon. The aim of the research was to determine the scale of said phenomenon and partially of social exclusion of the elderly, factors infl uencing the probability of the problem’s occurrence as well as counter-measures possible to apply on both personal and institutional level. The initial phase of the research consisted of 11 individual in-depth interviews (IDI). The most important part of the project involved quantitative research carried out on a nationwide, random, representative group of a thousand 65 years-old-people. This research was done through CATI interviews. The results were discussed during two focus group interviews (FGI). The aim of the interviews was to check the point of view of potential carers and people fi ghting with elderly people’s loneliness. Almost 20% of the Polish elderly can be considered lonely – they declare that often (10%) or always (7%) feel lonely. Almost half of the surveyed (47%) admitted never feeling lonely. The factors infl uencing the feeling of loneliness include: gender, age, education, marital status, source of income, place of living. Factors that increase the level of loneliness include lack of self-reliance and no possibilities of getting support in dealing with one’sdiffi cult situation. Family and relatives are the key factors in fi ghting with social exclusion. Friends and acquaintances are also important since they are often the only support of an elderly person. Local social policy should create suitable conditions for social integration of the elderly into the local community and limiting architectural barriers is one of the important elements of such a process. The fate of non self-reliant people depends on institutional solutions.

The article examines autoethnography (as a form of methodological nationalism), a conceptual tendency that is helpful in the process of the construction of a multi-sited research fi eld, (multi-sited ethnography), at two levels: spatial and temporal. I maintain that this type of data, (migration researcher’s experience and history of migration of the family and local community), allows a better understanding of the nature of migration, which is understood as a process of long duration. More importantly, today’s migrants perceive the migration of a hundred years ago, as well as the present, precisely as transmigration, and not as emigration or immigration.

The primary purpose of this article is to answer the question of whether writing a blog defined as a personal diary can help to better understand himself. Self-awareness is a prerequisite for authentic existence. In the first part analyzed the concept of authenticity. Pointed out the relationship of authenticity to the categories of freedom, truth and responsibility. The second part presents the relationship between authentic existence and the process of self-disclosure, which may take place in the blogosphere. In the third part presents the question whether a writing blog affects the level authenticity of existence. It was recognized that a key element of this phenomenon is the sense of responsibility.

American science fiction cinema of the 1970s began To employ eclectically presented references to eclectic views on religious topics. Films directed by artists such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas offered viewers the stories influenced by the Christian and Buddhist symbolism as well as selected theses of the New Age Movements. The authors wanted to create in their productions new religiousness patterns, derived from the writings of some leading figures of the counterculture, such as Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich, and Theodore Roszak. For this purpose they processed some storylines from science fiction novels and mass culture. This strategy was continued in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, however the productions from this period showed a radicalization of the educational-ideological context which was associated with the conservative policy of the USA during this period. The end of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century is a period of erosion the New Age optimism of science fiction cinema. The growing popularity of plots with catastrophic and dystopian visions of the future indicates that religious topic in contemporary cinema fulfills different functions.

Offi cial history at school manuals and in scientifi c publications presented by dominant group is very often questioned by minority groups. Their interpretation of bygone events usually based on oral history. They believed that history transmitted directly in group is more “authentic”, contrary to the offi cial which is more ideological.I went through internet discussion concerning historical background of two neighboring groups. They live on South-West of country, but during the division of Poland in 1792 they were incorporated to different states. One of them – Silesians were included to Prussia, the other group to Russian Empire. The collective memory of these groups were formed in different circumstances and now descendant of these group recall history in different way. They also presented another attitudes toward offi cial history. Nowadays, because of political reason, these groups live in one administration unit. In communist time, group of Russian background was the ruling one. Now Silesians are more infl uential in social life. What is interesting, both group used history in very instrumental way. The internet discussion shows how both group used their history to substantiate symbolic domination, how they invent their historical position. Discussion contains past events, commemoration of heroes (monuments, name of street), right to use dialect.

One of the sociological features of the current economic crises had been its beginning as a media fact rather than economic reality for ordinary people in Poland. Until the very end of 2008 the offi cial strategy of Polish government was denying of present of any economic crises in Poland: “The Polish economy as well as Polish banking system are used to be healthy and in good conditions and we will be suffer a little slow done because we are not an island”. Unfortunately it occurs not to be true.Based on discourse analysis of two major Polish daily and two weekly we would like to show the evolution of narrative describing crises in global terms and particularly at the domestic market. What was the picture of global crises at the beginning of this discussion, how it supposed to affect Poland, who serve as experts and opinion givers and finally how through the language we can observe the change from ‘slow down’ to ‘crises’? This are basic questions we would like to answer in our text.

The main problem of this text concerns the question of duality of human existence, and its relation with humans body. In the animistic paradigm body of a man is an “implement” unifying with the world, made by contact with sprits and ancestors. In the mechanical approach body is separate from consciousness, mind and spirit. It is a machine. In the holistic paradigm body is a part of the universe, and nowadays this universe is the informatics web. The man – golem, homunculus and automaton becomes part of total information. In this new situation the problem concerns psychological and moral attitude of man.

The article focuses on the various approaches to the phenomenon of old age in Poland from the perspective of social constructionism in sociology. It attempts to demonstrate that the defi nition of old age is not a primitive notion of essentialist character, but a set of meanings that are permanently transformed and negotiated depending on the social contexts in which they are deployed. The concept of social constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann serves as a theoretical prism for the analysis of the empirical material. The empirical material consists of a set of texts and commentaries from the readers and users of the Internet portal GazetaWyborcza and the report “Is Poland a country for old men?”. The major guideline for the analysis of the empirical material was to identify the major themes and spheres of social life discussed among the readers and Internet users. The subsequent steps were: synthesis and interpretation of the results.The analysis showed that the main concerns regarding the topic of old age are the following: public space as a place of alienation or even perhaps “invisibility” of older people, the labour market as an area of domination of young people, media described as the “dictatorship of young faces”, and the usage of new technologies by seniors.

This dissertation aims at an analysis of schematisation Polish social reality presented in a television serial M jak Miłość. Formulated hypothesis sounds: the image of world presented in M jak Miłość meets social demand of building the myth. This soap opera reflects norms and values recognised by spectacors as important and socially propagated. The analysis was carried out on episodes from 2008 to 2010. Selecting the sample group was intentional. The results of research confirmed the formulated hypothesis. M jak Miłość reflects social myths and stereotypes. The Mostowiak family fulfill idea of typical Polish family – multigenerational and based of kinship. The wide range of positive values is determined by love, care, protection and safety. An adultery, threat, untruth and jelaousy have negative appreciation. This soap opera has socialisational and educational possibilities. It also mainstains and promotes traditional values. M jak Miłość presents dichotomous behaviours: some of them are right, the other are wrong. The right behaviour is rewarded and wrong way of life is chastened. M jak Miłość has a plot adaptable for a lot of receivers what means that this television serial fulfils the soap opera requirements.

In contemporary aesthetics exists an belief, that the experience of art is the primary fact, which initiates and leads theoretical reflection, as also is the state basis of creating, valuing and the opinion on art. Present text is the test of philosophical recognition of relationship between field of products of new art as well as with context formative it experiences. Author motivates thesis, that radical changes in present art have their source in of meanings consisting on primary notion of experience changes. The present artistic practice goes away from aesthetical experience as empiria and the contemplation and used the notion of experience as experiment and investigation, which dismisses art from her proper functions and brings it rather to aggressive ideology of scientism. The recognition of this progressive change of meanings in founding the art notion of experience has the important consequences both for understanding of present art and for describing it theory.

The present article is a modest contribution to the reconstruction and systematization of a rich and seminal conception of René Girard. The letter belongs to a group of the most influential philosophers of culture of the XX and XXI century whose theories attempt at explaining the origins of this uniflue and diverse phenomen: culture Girard produces a coherent although a controversial theory of basic, fundament motives of human behavior (e.g. jalousie and strike for excellence and emulation) which set in motion a series of symbolic reactions leading to the emergence of organized society and finally social behavior. Those reactions were mainly responsible for the cultural development and progress.

Art based on the category of mimesis is over nowadays. One can ask about the time when its history has been finished. However, as far as one agrees that the mimetic art belongs to the past it is neither a matter of whether its decline refers Hegel’s theory of history nor whether it was the real end of art. The main purpose of this article is to consider the idea of the end of the mimetic art as a perfect presentation of the sensual world. This type of art was seen as a source of specific aesthetic experience.

In the presented article the author analyses one of the lately produced Polish movie series, using the semiotic understanding of the text of culture as every significant complete body. There are used the notions of sign and code as well as the convention of representing and creating of reality in various texts: literary or audio-visual. Using this theoretical supply, that permits “to read” the different products of culture as the texts: the internet pages, posters, performances, the literary text, billboards, computer games, paintings or television production the presented text takes as the object of analysis the way the nun figure is (re)constructed in the Sister’s series produced by Polish Television. The author recognizes the television series as one of modern symptoms of the “mythical speech”, using for the analysis the anthropological methodological and theoretical apparatus.

If one examine the descriptions of Polish gated communities they seems to be separated from ordinary world, bathed in greenery, offering safe and harmonious living in the incessantly changing and chaotically developing urban context. The critical discourse analysis method, used in this papaet, will allow for examining the process of interpenetrating spheres of the culture and economics, pointing at a few paradoxes which are illustrating reality of Polish gated communities.

Although Poland has been a country of emigration for many decades, Ireland has only recently become a destination country for Polish nationals. Most of the Polish migrants in Ireland came to this country directly prior or after the EU enlargement in May 2004. Therefore this community is still in the process of formation, and rapid changes can be observed. Despite the novelty of this migration fl ow, Polish citizens continue one of the largest immigration groups in Ireland. With the current circumstances of the freedom of movement between European Union states, new light can be put on the concepts of migration, ethnic identity and on such concepts as “home” and “belonging”. The aim of this paper is to describe and examine the process of the formation of Polish community in Ireland, showing how this situation differs from the situation of those Polish communities that have already been well established in other countries and how some patterns from the past are still replicated. The main focus of the paper would be analyze the infl uence of the Information and Communication Technologies on both, ethnic community formation and on the relationship between Polish migrants in Ireland, their local communities “back home” and migrants in other countries. I will argue that the traditional concept of “ethnic neighbourhood” does not apply to this community and it has been, to some extent, compensated by the notion of “virtual community”. I will also show the internal division within the community, which are no longer based on differences between migrants cohorts but rather are based on class and cultural capital characteristics. Finally, I will present the place of this community within the larger context of Polish Diaspora. The paper utilises data from my ongoing research on Polish migrants in Ireland. This research utilises qualitative methodology combining fieldwork, semi-structured interviews and on-line ethnography. In addition to that I have been using data from the Migrants Careers and Aspirations project, part of Trinity immigration research programme.

The current study examined the relations between working memory capacity, attention control, and general fluid intelligence. Participants performed multiple measures of each construct and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. The results suggested that attention control is an important component of the working memory and general fluid intelligence relation. Additionally, attention control accounted for unique variance in general fluid intelligence above and beyond working memory capacity. Consistent with the dual-component model of working memory, substantial independent variance was left over after accounting for attention control’s role in this relation. Therefore, other important mediating variables need to be accounted for to fully appreciate working memory’s ability to predict general fluid intelligence (e.g., retrieval from secondary memory).

In correspondence with pertinent statistical tests, it is of practical importance to design data-sampling when the Rasch model is used for calibrating an achievement test. That is, determining the sample size according to a given type-I- and type-II-risk, and according to a certain effect of model misfit which is of practical relevance is of interest. However, pertinent Rasch model tests use chi-squared distributed test-statistics, whose degrees of freedom do not depend on the sample size or the number of testees, but only on the number of estimated parameters. We therefore suggest a new approach using an F-distributed statistic as applied within analysis of variance, where the sample size directly affects the degrees of freedom. The Rasch model’s quality of specific objective measurement is in accordance with no interaction effect in a specific analysis of variance design. In analogy to Andersen’s approach in his Likelihood-Ratio test, the testees must be divided into at least two groups according to some criterion suspected of causing differential item functioning (DIF). Then a three-way analysis of variance design (A>B)xC with mixed classification is the result: There is a (fixed) group factor A, a (random) factor B of testees within A, and a (fixed) factor C of items cross-classified with A>B; obviously the factor B is nested within A. Yet the data are dichotomous (a testee either solves an item or fails to solve it) and only one observation per cell exists. The latter is not assumed to do harm, though the design is a mixed classification. But the former suggests the need to perform a simulation study in order to test whether the type-I-risk holds for the AxC interaction F-test – this interaction effect corresponds to Rasch model’s specific objectivity. If so, the critical number of testees is of interest for fulfilling the pertinent precision parameters. The simulation study (100 000 runs for each of several special cases) proved that the nominal type-I-risk holds as long as there is no significant group effect. Analysing a certain DIF, this F-test has fair power, consistently higher than Andersen’s test. Hence, we advise researchers to apply our approach as long as there is no significant group effect, and only to use other Rasch model tests if it is significant. Keep in mind that this is true only for some special cases and needs to be generalized in further research. Then a formula needs to be provided which will allow explicit calculation of the number of testees, given a type-I-, a type-II-risk, and a relevant effect as concerns Rasch model misfit.

A process-based approach is selected for studying the relationship between intelligence and the speed of information processing on the basis of the Posner Task. By applying meta-analytic methods, several studies involving this letter-matching task were used for gaining a large data set. Within the Posner Task, participants had to react to stimuli according to two different instructions. The first instruction required mainly perceptual processes, whereas the second involved mostly memory processes. Using a model with fixed links between manifest and latent variables, and a step-wise procedure to determine parameters, enabled us to study the influences these processes have on intelligence individually. The results of our study show a much stronger influence of memory processes than of perceptual processes. Also our study illustrates the advantages a fixed-links model can have in studying separate influences of processes, as opposed to a standard structural equation model.

Attentional blink (AB) denotes the impairment in identifying a target when this target follows a preceding target after about 150 to 500 msec. Several models explain AB and some studies suggest that more processes than only one are involved in AB. Therefore, confounding effects of these underlying processes might be the reason why previous studies could not observe a relationship between AB and psychometric intelligence. In the present study, fixed-links models were used to disentangle the processes underlying the performance of 66 female and 52 male volunteers on an AB task. In accordance with theoretical explanations of AB, three latent variables with loadings describing a linearly increasing, a linearly decreasing and a u-shaped trend described the data well. Psychometric intelligence was related to the latent variables reflected by the u-shaped (β = .30; p < .05) and the linearly increasing trends (β = .23; p < .05) but not to the latent variable reflected by the linearly decreasing trend (β = .10; n.s.). These results support the assumptions that more processes than only one are involved in AB. Decomposition of the underlying processes seems to be promising to investigate intelligence-related individual differences on this early level of information processing.

The research work reported in this paper addresses the question whether retest practice changes the speed-ability relationship. In three successive test sessions several cognitive tests of attention, memory and working memory were administered: Attention Switching Task, Continuous Attention Task, Memory Scanning Task, Letter Comparison Task, and Maintenance Summation Task. Retest practice led to substantial decreases of mean reaction time in the memory and working memory tasks while in attention tasks the effect was small or even insignificant. Intercepts, slopes and components representing sources with a constant, increasing and decreasing influence on responding were computed and correlated with ability. The results revealed that the correlation of the Letter Comparison task was large independently of retest practice. In contrast, for the Maintenance Summation Task the highest correlation was observed for the component representing the source with an increasing influence. Some retest practice seems to be necessary in order to establish the relationship of working memory and ability.

Different methods of reading instructions have been the subject of controversy. This study examined the influence of systematic phonics vs. non-systematic phonics methods of instruction on the prediction of reading. 443 kindergarten children were tested on phonological awareness, naming speed and visual word matching using the Bielefelder Screening (BISC). Children were retested in grades one and four. Results showed that although the prognostic validity of kindergarten measures was generally low, it was considerably higher for grade one children in classes with non-systematic phonics instruction. Children who received systematic phonics instruction scored significantly higher on measures of phonological decoding as compared to their peers who received less systematic instruction. Implications for the prediction of reading and early screenings are discussed.

These analyses examine the psychometric properties of the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test with Immediate Recall (FCSRT-IR). FCSRT-IR is a measure of memory under conditions that control attention and cognitive processing in order to obtain an assessment of memory unconfounded by normal agerelated changes in cognition. FCSRT-IR performance has been associated with preclinical and early dementia in several longitudinal epidemiological studies. Factor and item response theory analyses were applied to FCSRT-IR data from patients at a geriatric primary care center who had independently established clinical diagnoses. The results provide supporting evidence for the psychometric adequacy of the FCSR-IR in terms of reliability, essential (sufficient) unidimensionality, information across the continuum of memory disability/ability, and classification accuracy. The psychometric adequacy of the FCSRT-IR adds further validity to its use as a case finding strategy for dementia.

The assessment of aspects of learning potential like learning achievement and approaches in our days of life long learning is interesting for an appraisal of aptitude and the identification of high- and low-potentials. Due to the reported problems concerning the predictive validity of common instruments, we used the new experiment-based behavioral task LAsO for an assessment of learning achievement, time effort, learning approaches and tempo during learning based on a micro analytic action research. We analysed reliability and incremental validity on a sample of 322 apprentices. Beneath the valuated behavior by the formation team and a short scale for conscientiousness, the integration of the LAsO-scores into two block binary logistic regression analyses revealed, that the LAsO-scores are significant predictors for high- and low-potentials and therefore provide increment predictive validity.