Lefteast
East versus West is once again a hot topic in Romania. Or rather a superficial repositioning – which doesn’t mean that it has a lesser influence over public agenda setting – in the never-ending battle between Europeanizers (white collars, hard-boiled capitalists, entrepreneurs) and Traditionalists of all denominations (nationalists either of Interbellum persuasion or converted during […]
This article deals with the connection between manele and the criminal world in Romania. Although I finished it more than a year ago, I hesitated a long time before publishing it – it seemed that these things, though known, wouldn’t necessarily do justice to my favourite musical genre and would certainly upset those who work […]
“The video was originally presented at an event organized by the initiaitve Danes je Nov dan (Slovenian for Today is a new day) on 25 March 2013. Danesjenovdan.si is a newly born platform to collect and discuss ideas and questions effecting numerous people. When a certain problem reaches enough attention, the founders of Danes je […]
“A new analysis showing how the radical policies advocated by western economists helped to bankrupt Russia and other former Soviet countries after the Cold War has been released by researchers. The study, led by academics at the University of Cambridge, is the first to trace a direct link between the mass privatisation programmes adopted by […]
Interviewed by Florin Faje and Alina-Sandra Cucu, 11 March 2013, Budapest Biographical note John Clarke is a Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, UK and a recurrent Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, at Central European University. He is one of the best-known social policy researchers of his generation. […]
In one of his essays, Zygmunt Bauman (1999) deals with the existential terror induced from having knowledge about the finiteness of our existence. According to Bauman, the pre-modern world could deal with the fear of death by firmly weaving individual existence into the eternity of the afterlife. Two pillars assumed this role in the modern […]
There is a Robinson Crusoe-like syndrome among Albanians, which can be dissected in two psychological moments. The first, a feeling of isolation which comes not only as a political isolation of the present and past, but also as a mentality which rarely steps over the home-border of social and political commitment. Such a phenomenon produces […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r05bhjMsuzY&feature=youtu.be
“The very existence of my research site is unethical … My university Institutional Review Board (IRB) did not prepare me for any of this.” –Jonathan Stillo, “Research Ethics in Impossibly Unethical Situations” (posted 21-Dec-2011 on the cac.ophony.org weblog) Recently, someone commented that my research project is a good match for the foundation that awarded my dissertation […]
Since mid-February, a popular uprising has brought out thousands in city squares across Bulgaria, giving voice to grievances accumulated over the last 23 years and reinserting the popular into the country’s politics. What began as a spontaneous expression of discontent at the rising electricity prices grew into a protest against the role of the privatized […]