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“Black Is Polish”: The Emerging Activism of Black Poles in Contemporary Poland
Full text linkRelying on the global effect of Black Lives Matter, this chapter presents a cautious optimism of anti-racist activism in an unusual location such as Poland. The chapter sheds light on the latest wave of the anti-racist mobilization concentrated around the grassroot initiative—Czarne jest Polskie [Black is Polish] in Poland. The mobilization draws attention to the fundamental roles of race and racism in the country and appears to have revived conversations about the representation of Black people in Poland. By focusing on the grassroot activism initiated by ‘Black is Polish,’ this chapter looks at the implications of anti-racism for White and non-White populations in Poland. Using the analytical tools of social movements theories, the chapter accounts for the cognitive opening of major elements of mobilization structures and key practices that shape the anti-racist movement in contemporary Poland. Through this, we demonstrate that the recent upsurge in grassroots mobilization signifies a new phase in the evolution of post-Covid and post-George Floyd era, driven by the worldwide BLM movement, even in unexpected locales such as Poland, where discussions on race are typically deemed non-existent
App-solutely healthy in India: Entrepreneurial imaginaries, materialities, and future-making in digital health technologies
Full text linkThis thesis is an anthropological study of future-making in digital health technologies (or simply, digital health). It asks how and what future socialities are imagined by those who inhabit the sites of design and production of digital health. The bulk of its ethnographic material borrows from my year long, daily, immersive participant observation at a health app start-up in India, working alongside interlocutors as both practitioner and researcher. Following wider entanglements and networks out of the start-up, the project’s other significant ethnographic registers include hospital visits with the country’s apex authority tasked with setting up digital health infrastructure, as well as attending health/technology conferences. The thesis advocates the analytical benefit of approaching future-making by digital health as an assemblage, organised by desired futures that its materialities render evident. At a national level, these futures assume the form of entrepreneurially-infused imaginaries, two of which the project speaks to: one advancing technology as messianic, and the other reiterating a particular idea of the Indian nation and its place in the world. In the health app start-up, these emic imaginaries scaffold (albeit indirectly) the promise: an animating heuristic, a futural rationale that is encoded within the socialities of design and production. For the health app’s users or clients, the promise actualises as affective socialities of becoming, predicated on ideas of the good life and/or wellbeing. In turn, these are delivered to them by the health app through curations and performances of intimacy, figuring the app as an evocative object. The result is that digital health can be seen as collapsing the distinctions between the analytical conceptualisations of the body, as individual, social, and body politic, giving rise to a new form of healthism. Here, in seeking to remedy a concern, digital health engenders additional issues and solutions where it is often but technology that is yet again positioned as the vehicle of redressal. Ultimately, the kind of anthropology this thesis does is that of cultural critique, its larger ambition rooted in presenting and contributing to alternative readings of digital in/and the Global South, reaffirming critique as a way of knowing
Palestine in the 1972 Egyptian Student Uprising: Arab Solidarities of Principle and Affect
Full text linkIn January 1972, Egypt’s university campuses were shut down by a wave of student protest, after President Anwar Sadat appeared to be abandoning plans for a military response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The uprising, culminating in hundreds of arrests, marked the first significant mobilization against Sadat’s new regime and drew widespread public sympathy. Drawing on life history interviews, memoirs, press archives, lawyers’ records, and student publications, this article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the political formation of the Egyptian student movement and catalyzed its emergence. It argues that the students engaged in profoundly affective solidarity practices with Palestine, first in affirmation of longstanding Egyptian nationalist frameworks of opposition to Zionism, and further in contestation of wider political relations under Sadat. Whilst transnational solidarity features prominently in global histories of decolonization, it has rarely been used to interrogate Egyptian popular politics in the 1970s. By foregrounding Egyptians’ evolving affective solidarities with Palestine, this article challenges dominant narratives around the decline of Arab nationalism after 1967 and the rise of Islamism in its place. In doing so, the article reveals the complex dynamics of Egyptian-Palestinian relations over time, within a broader landscape of Arab and global anticolonial struggles
Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing
Full text linkHistorians generate knowledge through the labour of composition – through the friction between interpretation and evidence that makes claims open to scrutiny and challenge. This essay argues that when composition is bypassed, that structure disappears. Generative AI raises this issue in urgent fashion. Current large language models produce what the essay terms ‘stochastic history’: prose that replicates the surface forms of historical explanation without enacting the disciplinary reasoning behind them. Such prose flattens temporal complexity into chronological adjacency, inherits narrative patterns without deliberating over them and reproduces hegemonic framings without the mechanisms – archival friction, peer contestation and historiographical consciousness – through which the discipline revises itself. Recent studies measuring AI's applicability to historical work capture transmissive tasks while remaining blind to the interpretive core; approaches that identify textual markers of historical thinking detect symptoms that can be simulated, not the compositional process producing them. The consequences extend beyond the profession. When stochastic history circulates in classrooms, policy research and public media, non‐specialists encounter pasts stripped of contingency and contestability – pasts that naturalize present arrangements rather than rendering them open to challenge. The defence of writing advanced here is methodological rather than nostalgic: It preserves the conditions under which historical claims can be scrutinized and revised
Language and Identity: Analysing the Discourse of the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan
Full text linkThis thesis examines the linguistic features of democratic protest discourse in Taiwanese Mandarin, with a focus on Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement in March 2014. The study approaches it as a discursive phenomenon shaped through interaction across genres, platforms and social actors, rather than treating the movement as a unified political event. By analysing protest-related discourse, the thesis explores how language functions as a form of social practice through which democratic meanings, civic identities and power relations are articulated and negotiated in Taiwan’s contemporary political context. In terms of methodology, the study adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach, combining quantitative corpus techniques with qualitative discourse interpretation. Corpus analysis is used to identify salient linguistic patterns, including frequency, co-occurrence and lexical salience, which then inform more detailed qualitative analysis. The analysis is organised across three analytical levels - text anlaysis, discourse practice and social practice - providing a structured framework for examining how linguistic patterns relate to broader communicative and social processes. The findings indicate that Sunflower Movement discourse is characterised by extensive intertextuality and interdiscursivity across genres, through which competing interpretations of democratic participation and claims to civic legitimacy were articulated and contested within Taiwanese society. Within this multi-genre discursive environment, the analysis of the 被 (bei) construction demonstrates how agency, responsibility and victimhood were differentially distributed, revealing ongoing tensions between institutional authority and civic actors. Social media discourse further intensified these dynamics by enabling bottom-up participation and facilitating the circulation and reconfiguration of alternative interpretations beyond the constraints of traditional media. Overall, these findings show that, although public discussion of the movement has diminished over the past decade, the discursive patterns established during the Sunflower Movement continue to shape debates on democracy, identity and political participation in Taiwan. This thesis thus contributes to a linguistically grounded understanding of democratic discourse in Taiwan and demonstrates the value of corpus-assisted approaches for analysing political and social movements in Chinese-language contexts
When Rain Meets Surge: Assessing Future Typhoon‐Driven Compound Flood Hazard Profiles in a Rapidly Urbanizing Delta
No full textPlain Language Summary: Typhoons are strong tropical storms that can cause higher coastal water levels and heavy rain, leading to floods in coastal cities. This study uses advanced simulation methods to predict inundation profiles during typhoons by the end of this century for a large coastal town under global warming conditions. It found that rising sea levels might have a bigger impact on future flooding than rainfall changes. Future typhoons in extreme warming conditions could bring up to 230 mm of rain, increasing by 28 mm per hour, raising flood depth by 1.2 cm, and spreading flooded areas by 25 km². Rising sea levels during typhoons could add 8 cm to flood depth and expand flooded areas by 29 km². When both heavy rain and rising sea levels occur, inundation height and extent increase remarkably. Typhoon Hagupit shows the strongest compound effect. These findings stress the need for specific actions to protect coastal cities from the combined threats of rain and sea‐level rise
Tibetan Verbs With Root -a-
Full text linkThis paper examines the ablaut patterns of Tibetan verbs with the root vowel -a-, challenging the traditional analysis which treats these patterns as recent developments. By analyzing four specific ablaut patterns (a-a, e-a, o-a, a-o), the study demonstrates that these patterns are inherited and thus relevant for the reconstruction of the Trans-Himalayan verbal system. The findings suggest that these ablaut patterns have a historical significance overlooked in previous scholarship, particularly in Coblin’s (1976) analysis
HashimaXR Game Design Documents
No full textGame Design Documents for HashimaXR, exported from Nuclino, a collaborative wiki and knowledge base platform for team documentation. Contains narrative design, gameplay mechanics, historical research notes, asset specifications, episode outlines and scripts, and project management files for an unreleased XR reconstruction of Hashima Island (Gunkanjima), Japan
Portfolio opportunities and choice
No full textPortfolio management is important for rational investors to create the best possible investment portfolio to ensure maximum return at a given risk, taking into account the behavioral assumptions underpinning portfolio theory. Portfolio opportunities and choices present general principles for investors in the portfolio management process. This chapter extends the discussion on portfolio analysis and offers insights on risk and return trade-offs. The chapter covers the portfolio management process; consumption and portfolio choice; optimal portfolio; portfolio choice and risk attitudes; risk and return trade-off; efficient portfolio, and diversification and risk
Refugees Separated by the Global Color Line: The Power of Europeanness, Whiteness, and Sameness
No full textIt is often erroneously assumed that Russians and Ukrainians are the “same people.” This conviction of sameness partly drove the aggressive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with a determination to forcefully drag a sovereign nation onto an assumed similar destination with Russia and Belarus. Such an assault on a sovereign nation drew denunciations from organizations and people around the world. Nonetheless, by November 2022, the invasion had resulted in the tragic loss of numerous innocent Ukrainian lives and compelled an unprecedented number of people to seek sanctuary throughout Europe. The same event prompted a growing use of the language of imperialism to characterize Russia's supremacy, concurrently giving rise to the logic of Europeanness and whiteness. In this IMR Dispatch, I explore the impact of Europeanness, whiteness, and sameness on people of color fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. While it is crucial to examine the systematic racialization of these people, I argue that the racialized border enforcement witnessed during the conflict is better understood when viewed through the global color line embedded within migration and border management, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where racialized logics are still underplayed
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