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At the turn of the 21st century, the spatial turn that took place in various fields of humanities and social sciences could also be observed in literary studies. On the international level, research was inspired by topics and theories from such fields as architecture, urban studies, sociology or anthropology. Slovak literary studies, however, has not been significantly inspired by geopoetics and has not devoted systematic attention to the study of urban locations and motives. This article provides a basic overview of existing research into the representations of urban settings in Slovak literature. It maps topics and methodological background of individual research initiatives with a special focus on literary and artistic representations of Bratislava. The paper also outlines new lines of inquiry, such as the relationship between literary representations of the city in the post-socialist Central Europe and the phenomenon of nostalgia. It also suggests the possibilities of comparative research. With regards to the latter, the author argues that juxtaposing literary representations of Bratislava with representations of urban settings in the literatures of other European “small nations” (Miroslav Hroch) offers more fruitful ground for research than searching for similarities in culturally and geographically closer Hungarian or Czech literature. The article also provides a list of selected literature on the problematics of urban representations in Slovak literature and culture.
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The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and colonialism in the Middle East radically changed the situation. World War I was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Kurds, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suffered genocide – including at the hands of Kurds. Moreover, the post-Ottoman order precluded the Kurds from building a nation-state of their own. Kurds were either relegated to cultural and political subordination under the Turkish and Persian nation states, or a precarious existence under alternative orders (colonialism in Syria and Iraq, and communism in the Soviet Union). The nation-state system changed the pre-national, Ottoman imperial order with culturally heterogeneous territories into a system of nation-states which began to produce nationalist homogenisation by virtue of various forms of population policies.
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In this issue, we have brought together articles focusing on Indian and South Asian migration experiences and patterns. India has been a major player in international migration, including remittances flows, but also a major scene of internal migrations. This is to an extent perhaps expected as the second largest population in the world residing across a vast geography rich with ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. The 2018 United Nations World Migration Report states that the Indian diaspora is the largest in the world, with over 15.6 million people living outside the Sub-continent. International migration from India can be traced back even before indentured labour flows initiated under the British colonialism. India is a leading country of origin and a major supplier of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled work force. These migration flows from India has attracted significant interest among scholars of migration studies. In this editorial, we are offering some insights and an overview of Indian migrations since the British era.
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The concept of form is one of the most intuitive within our experience. When we say that two objects of different dimensions have or do not have the same form there is not properly a reflexion behind this claim. Rather, it is, at all appearances, based on our visual faculties, which is perfectly in order in the context of our daily life. This intuitive and visual notion of form is suitable to the necessities of our practical, or also esthetical, experience. However, on second thought, things are not so easy: suppose that I look at an object and I find that it is circular. I claim, hence, that it is a circle and my statement is correct. Another person looks at this object from another point of view and sees that this object is an ellipsis or a hyperbola or a parabola. He is not wrong. This person is not the prey of a dream or of a hallucination. He is observing the world from another point of view, or as usually told in mathematics and physics, from another reference frame. A further example is even more indicative: it is well known that, if one treats the problem of the planetary orbits around the Sun as a two bodies problem, the orbit is an ellipsis: but, in respect to what reference frame is it an ellipsis?
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Dear readers of our journal, this issue included many interesting and also important articles, which can shift the problematic of education in the more prospective way. I am very thankful to editor of the journal for the space how to express ideas about current problems of education. The science education is fighting with a relatively big problem. Many academicians, teachers and also laic society are still perceiving difficulty in understanding of concepts from science subject and lack of interest about this group of subjects. In the past the teaching process was very formal focused on the memorizing of the facts without any deeper understanding of the processes in the nature. Pupils and students knew all definitions about concepts in the science subjects, but practical application was on the low level.
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Nothing is more our own than our biography. Even the body, in which we spend our whole life, from birth to death, even this body, closest to us, our very own, the body that roots us into existence, although at the same time it betrays us every day, is only a loan with a definite if usually hidden payment deadline. It is only someone who, looking at the life of another person, says: gráphō, that shifts events, a sometimes extensive series of the body’s adventures, into the sphere of shareable words. Becoming a biographer with this declaration, he or she seeks meaning where there (probably) is none, and has never been. And yet, for reasons difficult to understand, for a long time the humanities looked down on life writing. Decreed by Barthes in 1968, for two or even three decades “the death of the author” continued to be an almost universal proclamation. Writing biographies seemed a menial task compared to developing sophisticated text exegeses or theoretical and methodological speculations, which, once announced to the world, were hardly taken up. But let us leave aside the humanists with their eternal troubles and dilemmas. Let us save biography as a form of grasping and understanding life – including one’s own life, as “everybody’s autobiography”, according to Gertrude Stein. But if it wants more than just popularity with readers, life writing should not stick to its old ways. Today, biographers face the obligation to develop new forms of biographical discourse. Full rights must be granted to fragmentary biographies, focused on one topic, in fundamental opposition to holistic approaches that span birth and death. To biographies selecting one role played by the protagonist over the years, or a single event, around which all other events are centred. To acoustic biographies or – this could be done – biographies in which the privileged way of settling into existence would be the eye and the act of looking, as was the case in Cézanne’s life. To parallel biographies, tangled together or perhaps multiply tied, which embrace the evident truth that every “I” establishes itself in relation to some “you” and some “him” or “her”. What seems most important in this new biography writing, however, is to cross the boundaries of individual life as soon as possible. Tense anticipation: are we going to see an electric arc in the gap between two lives, between being (of one) and being (of another), an arc that will connect them, establishing a continuity of existence. Between the one who died and the newly born. And hence Schulz, hence his biography.
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Recently, in Lithuanian educational discourse there has been a lot of discussion about leadership. This has become so popular phenomenon that quite often one even does not go deep into the most important parameters of this phenomenon. Leadership phenomenon is not a very new thing, having started to be investigated more exhaustively as far back as the second half of the 20th century, however, over the last decade a lot of attention has been devoted to this in Lithuania. One can reasonably assert, that this is even a matter of fashion. During the aforementioned period, various questions such as teacher leadership, leadership development in schools (as if everyone has to be only a leader), leadership influence on organisation management and other have been investigated in one way or another. On the other hand, quite a lot of attention has been devoted to school managers, having in mind that they should not be just managers, but real managers – leaders. There is no intention to discuss various leadership concepts or to give any recipes how to turn teachers and managers to leaders. Moreover, there exists a vast diversity of concepts. It is obvious, that poor, ineffective and unsuitable management affects the teachers and the teaching learning process itself. It is logical, that this aspect has to be evaluated, and only people suitably prepared and ready for this should become managers of educational institutions. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be fair to identify managers and management with leadership.
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The platforms supporting social networking activities on the Internet are applications for the creation, sharing and exchange of user-generated content that manifests in various forms. Users can freely express their ideas and opinions, and have opportunities to launch and participate in collaborative projects and virtual communities. Facebook (FB) is a social networking website featuring an explosive growth in the last years and an increased popularity among university students. For example, the number of Facebook users in Romania was 8.5 million in June 2016 (Facebrands.Ro, 2015) out of which 33% are young people of 15-24 years old. Recent research on the Facebook use shows that Romanian university students have large Facebook networks and spend a lot of minutes per day (Pribeanu & Lamanauskas, 2016). The social networking websites are challenging the university students to broaden their horizon and enlarge their social networks. The shift of paradigm towards social learning brings in front various activities such as: meetings, active participation, critical thinking, information and content sharing, collaboration, and debate. Last but not least, Facebook is favoring the informal education: students learn to be, to act, and to participate in a learning community (Brown & Adler, 2008). Although the main usage of Facebook is related to socialization (Madge et al., 2009), the social networking acts as a vehicle for spreading out information and knowledge as well as a stimulus for the engagement with various curricular and extra-curricular activities.
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The aim of the special section in this issue is to identify and examine methodological opportunities for conducting research on Muslims, while also noting challenges and uncertainties. The focus is on methodological and ethical challenges encountered while conducting both qualitative and quantitative research in increasingly unstable socio-political environments. The section examines how researchers address such challenges, and brings together scholars whose research involves studying aspects of Muslim politics from various disciplinary backgrounds. The objective is to identify ethical and practical challenges involved in studying Islam, share insights and experiences of researchers from the Middle East and North Africa, and develop improved techniques to collect good quality data from Muslim groups and societies. The overall aim is arrive at a better understanding of the ethics, politics, and responsibilities involved in studying Islam and Muslims in our age: one characterized by a defiant and resurgent faith.
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Migration is typically portrayed as an effective response to socio-economic hardship. Pushed by a lack of work at home and pulled by the promise of higher wages abroad, people relocate. When those moves succeed, migrants transfer money home (Yang, 2015). A logical, predictable system that is confirmed by evidence as well as World Bank figures noting migrants returned a record $689 billion globally in 2018; and while researchers expected the pandemic to push down wages, the decline to this point has been modest. Remittances continued apace and serve to cushion the impacts of the pandemic (Ratha et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the assumption that the decision to migrate is straight-forward misses how socially complex the processes can be, particularly during the pandemic (Pintor Sandoval and Bojorquez Luque, 2021, Marwah and Ramanayake 2021, Gupta et al., 2021).
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As disciplines reach maturity, a dynamic meta-structure is needed, which facilitates merging and new divisions of disciplines. Under such a meta-structure, the disciplines propel the evolution of knowledge, but adapt themselves when driving forces emerge sufficient to provoke their adaptation (Suarez-Orozco, Satin-Bajaj, 2010). This means that on the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education must give transdisciplinary view (Flogie, Aberšek, 2015). Science-education research studies and STEM teachers’ classroom experiences have shown that analogies and transdisciplinar point of view, when used properly, can help make science concepts meaningful to students. Throughout the history, analogies have played an important role in scientific discoveries, not as proof, but as inspiration. Analogies have also played an important role in explaining those discoveries (Kaiser, 1989). Science teachers, like scientists, frequently use analogies to explain concepts to students (James, Scharmann, 2007). The analogies serve as initial models, or simple representations, of science concepts.
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I would like to thank the editor of the journal, who gave me space to write some sentences about some actual problems of education. I am interested in science education, so the problems occurring in science education are close to me. So I would like to introduce you some problems of science subjects, which are well known, but solutions are searched for, how to improve the interest in science subjects among pupils and students. All below presented ideas are the opinions of the authors, you can disagree with or agree. The purpose is to evoke the discussion about the presented problematic. This problematic is still present in many articles, which are warning on the decreasing interest in this group of subject. So, where is the reason, that only a small amount of pupils and students like science subjects? There are plenty of answers, but which of them is correct? Maybe this one, that curriculum is focused on the knowledge too, not on the searching for reasons, why some things happened. And it can be the reason, why pupils hate these kinds of subjects.
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