This article discusses the relatively new phenomenon of corporate activism concerning the LGBT+ community in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. It highlights how companies use various forms of corporate activism to show support and solidarity with LGBT+ people, especially during Pride Month. The authors note that there is a need to understand how these actions are perceived by civil society organizations (CSOs) that support LGBT+ people. To address this issue, a qualitative study was conducted to gather the perceptions of 11 CSO representatives from different organizations on the activities undertaken by companies for LGBT+ groups. The study intended to explore whether CSOs identified the support provided by businesses as activities to protect human rights, which business activities were valued most by the LGBT+ community, and what business actions in the public sphere are expected.

This study identifies the mnemonic strategies of the Slovak extreme-right Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko (ĽSNS) / People’s Party Our Slovakia as a means of establishing a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia. ĽSNS’s construction of mnemonic culture surrounding two critical events in Slovak history – the 1944 Slovak National Uprising and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army and its allies – is marked by an effort to overcome the ideological divide between its extreme-right ideology and Russia’s identity and memory politics rooted in its anti-fascist heritage. Those two events represent an uneasy terrain for building political and mnemonic alliances between ĽSNS and Putin’s Russia. Even though these two historical milestones represent a seemingly unmasterable past and an obstacle in an ĽSNS-Russia alliance, the party implemented several mnemonic strategies to reconfigure the place of these two key historical events in national memory and clear the path for a closer alliance with Putin’s Russia. We argue that ĽSNS’s memory construction is multidirectional rather than competitive or discordant. We unpack ĽSNS’s memory construction and identify multidirectional effects and trajectories as vectors for building a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia.

Stefano Bianchini’s comprehensive work Liquid Nationalism focuses on the frequent redrawing of state borders, especially in Eastern Europe, the fluidity of the contours of nations, and the vagaries and idiosyncratic nature of political changes in the European continent from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The title of this work takes its inspiration from Zygmunt Bauman’s famous work, Liquid Modernity (2000). Bauman’s work, which was published in 2000 in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and also Yugoslavia that resulted in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, first posits the obvious – that fluids cannot hold their shape as solids do because the structural arrangements of solids, unlike liquids, bind their atoms together. Bauman characterizes solidity as having hardened contours and belonging to a pre-modernity with its unchanging or slowly changing social, political, and economic mores. Modernity, on the other hand, is likened to liquids in that, like time, there is a fluidity and a fast-moving quality associated with it brought about by the European Enlightenment and the development of democracy and capitalism. As he states, “When describing solids, one may ignore time altogether; in describing fluids, to leave time out of account would be a grievous mistake. Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture” (2). The lightness of touch, the quickness of response to changing times that liquid modernity promised, he points out, has resulted in postmodernity or late capitalism as “deregulation, liberalization, ‘flexibilization’, increased fluidity, unbridling the financial, real estate and labor markets, easing the tax burden, etc.” (5).

This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891–1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation – a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.

Michael Almeida has recently tried to show that if S5 correctly represents metaphysical necessity, there can be no non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. Evidence would thus be irrelevant to the reasonability of traditional theistic belief. Almeida's argument has implications beyond its announced target: it amounts to a new argument for sweeping scepticism. Almeida's argument for the irrelevance of evidence to the existence of God would apply to any state of affairs that entails some metaphysical necessity. In S5, every state of affairs entails some metaphysical necessity, so Almeida should conclude that non-trivial evidence for or against any state of affairs is impossible. I argue that the problem is not with S5 but with inadequately motivated assumptions about evidential support. Avoiding those assumptions disables the argument for sweeping scepticism and without foreclosing the possibility of non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God.

At the conclusion of the 1950s in Japan, plans to reclaim and develop Tokyo Bay were proposed by the Japan Housing Corporation's president and a private think tank on economic affairs. The vision was incompatible with dispersion, the basic direction of the state's policy, so it was quickly rejected, but its legacy lived on as the trans-Tokyo Bay highway in 1997. This article argues that the lack of an effective national policy led to contradictory initiatives and divisions among the stakeholders, leaving open the way for the large-scale reclamation and development of Tokyo Bay.

In the Roman world, lamps with replicated images of sex were in circulation from the late 1st c. BCE until the end of the 4th c. CE. This paper maps out key regional and chronological trends in the representation and consumption of these objects using data from 11 provincial sites. It demonstrates sustained sensitivity of replicated sexual disc-reliefs to distinctive regional styles of consumption and representation. It also shows that symplegmata disc-reliefs were interacting and changing over time, resulting in innovative imagery that produced new meanings in localized contexts. This is the first comparative systematic study of the styles of consumption and representation of replicated lamp iconography using statistical methods. As such, the paper contributes a novel methodological approach to Roman sexuality research and also advances our understanding of how Roman replicated sexual imagery came about, how it constructed meaning, and how it was consumed by different communities over time.

We present an abstract model of rationality that focuses on structural properties of attitudes. Rationality requires coherence between your attitudes, such as your beliefs, values and intentions. We define three ‘logical’ conditions on attitudes: consistency, completeness and closedness. They parallel the familiar logical conditions on beliefs, but contrast with standard rationality conditions such as preference transitivity. We establish a formal correspondence between our logical conditions and standard rationality conditions. Addressing John Broome’s programme ‘rationality through reasoning’, we formally characterize how you can (not) become more logical by reasoning. Our analysis connects rationality with logic, and enables logical talk about multi-attitude psychology.

The UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) and their concept of human rights due diligence (HRDD) cannot succeed in their current form, because they reify neoliberalism’s public/private divide. This article establishes this argument across historical, theoretical, and normative dimensions, and charts a new way forward. The UNGPs’ separation of the ‘state duty to protect’ from the ‘corporate responsibility to respect’ reflects a contestable conception of companies as private actors: free to act/transact in any way that is not harmful. This is a problem because harm is often invisible, even when taking an active due-diligence approach. To resolve this, HRDD practices must also be based on the positive value of equality. However, businesses are more than mere agents; they also coordinate production and enable social connections. These structural features reveal a ‘missing fourth pillar’ of the UNGPs: a collective political responsibility to challenge and change our current world order.

This article examines the work of Korean writer Chu Yosŏp, originally written in Korean taking the guise of a Korean translation of a Chinese-language story (born-translated literature). Chu's audience was steeped in Sinophobia orchestrated by the colonizing Japanese empire. His unprecedented genre recounts the lesser-known, lived experiences of the Chinese lower class that Korean-language news media failed to report. My analysis of Chu's work demonstrates, first, that the feigned Chinese voices of this genre illuminate transnational Sino-Korean affinities that were forcibly suppressed by colonial policies and discourses. Second, born-translated literature upends and reconfigures the colonial structure of surrogate feeling, in which the colonized emote in the service of the colonizer. Third, Chu's aesthetic strategy of deconstructing colonial affect attends to and redirects evershifting cultural processes, rather than tackling discrete entities, to surmount the active–passive divide. In so doing, his literature seeks to refashion a politico-aesthetic ecosystem encompassing the Sino-Korean clash, rather than confounding specific ideologies. Finally, the aesthetic for the lower-class Chinese people in Chu's born-translated stories is predicated on metaphysical ethics in which antithetical others mutate into inviolable others, and in which the practice of saving others dovetails with transforming ourselves.

The discursive construction of institutional identity concerns how speakers, through their verbal conduct, perform actions as incumbents of particular institutional roles. This can be accomplished through the first-person plural pronoun, a salient marker of the ongoing displays, expressions, and constructions of institutional identity. Drawing on the Chinese premier's press conferences, this study investigates how politicians, journalists, and interpreters constitute their institutional identities through their use of the first-person plural pronoun (English we; Mandarin 我们 wǒmen). Relying on qualitative analysis and bivariate analysis, this study shows that Chinese journalists and interpreters tend to constitute their identities as aligned with the Chinese authority. This stands in contrast to patterns identified in independent press systems, in which journalists confront politicians, and interpreters serve as impartial facilitators. The findings illustrate the bounded fluidity of identities in political discourse and provide insight into the workings of the political communication system in an authoritarian context. (Political discourse, identity, personal pronoun, press conference, journalistic norm, mass communication, interpreter-mediated interaction, China, authoritarianism)*

Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the ‘stacked plot’ of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic sabotage. In reconstructing the historical events associated with this subversive effort, this essay explores how, after its adoption as an imaging device utilized in radio astronomy, the stacked plot gave representation to the diplomacy agendas of two distinct groups. The post-punk reworking of the stacked plot exemplified the ambition of this artistic movement to attack the images associated with social conventions and norms by amplifying their ‘semantic noise’, and, in so doing, seeking to negotiate a social space for those sharing these subversive goals. Conversely, radio astronomers used the stacked plot to display the presence of interfering radio transmitters in the frequencies exclusively allocated to astronomical research, thus advocating the removal of this electronic noise in the context of international telecommunication negotiations. The article thus shows how the representation of different types of noise through similar images shaped contrasting ambitions in the separate domains of science diplomacy and everyday diplomacy.

During the 2019 archaeological excavation season in Blaundos, a Roman-period bronze medallion was found within a wall of a Byzantine-period structure on the main street. It is a medallion struck by the Lydian city of Silandos, bearing the bust of Faustina II on the obverse and Marcus Aurelius clasping hands with Lucius Verus on the reverse. A literature search revealed that it is a rare and unpublished specimen. Neither RPC, the largest database of Roman Provincial Coinage, nor auction databases record any example of it. The iconography, combining the portrait of the empress with a depiction of the co-emperors of the period, does not point to any specific event or incident. The reverse die was, however, used for another medallion struck later by Silandos. This paper aims to introduce, interpret, and discuss this unique Lydian medallion from the 2nd c. CE.