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Updating common knowledge
Have you ever wondered how the results of scientific research get written up, published, disseminated and, in some cases, eventually accepted as conventional wisdom? How do those obscure academic articles in hard-to-remember journals contribute to our everyday understanding of the world around us? Are you perplexed over how science says one thing today only to […]
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Just ourselves
In his 1993 book Pleasant the Scholar’s Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction of the Nation State, Maurice Goldring emphasised the role of intellectuals in shaping Irish cultural nationalism. He distinguished between revolts and revolutions. Without some articulation of ideas that might drive change a revolt could never become a revolution: ‘Gavroche, in Les Misérables, […]
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Capitalism’s misunderstood architects
John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek published their landmark works over 75 years ago, so why do their ideas still generate such debate today? Kritika & Kontext devotes a special issue to a re-evaluation of these two 20th-century behemoths in economic thought – one a staunch advocate of government intervention in markets, the other […]
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‘It was a cozy atmosphere’
In the final episode of Knowledgeable Youth, the Ukrainian students of the Free People Educational Hub in Vienna reflect on what kind of future they envision for themselves and the world. Their conversation is inspired by the article “Children of the Twenty-First Century” by Lucas Becht, which delves into young people’s futuristic visions in Poland […]
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Taming the ship of fools
Greta Thunberg accused participants of the 2023 World Economic Forum with ‘fuelling the destruction of the planet’. G. Thunberg, interview outside World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, 19 January 2023, https://www.commondreams.org/news/davos-greta-thunberg She argued that the irresponsibility of the economic elite, who ‘are prioritizing self-greed, corporate greed and short-term economic profits’, discredits their alleged […]
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‘Science is cool’
Due to differences in school systems between Ukraine and Austria, Ukrainian adolescents often enter university earlier than Austrian students. This episode of the Knowledgeable Youth podcast discusses the variations in higher education. The students’ conversation centres around Agata Zysiak’s article ‘Bleaching Blue Collars’ that draws insights from the experiences of first-generation students under state socialism […]
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Pirate AI
ChatGPT and generative AI truly burst onto the scene in late 2022. There’s a good chance that the intersection between books, publishing and AI first crossed your radar sometime in 2023, quite possibly after The Atlantic’s investigation revealed hundreds of thousands of pirated books had been used to train this technology. It was all going […]
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Press freedom amid martial law
At first, everyone contrasted the outspoken freedom of Ukraine’s media with Russia’s blank censorship. Two years on, the gap doesn’t look that tremendous. It has even shifted since I began researching Ukrainian media legislation at the University of Glasgow in 2024. Cases such as Bihus.info journalists being bugged and the subsequent backlash against the Security […]
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Occupied futures
As the object of study rather than the subject of communication, the so-called Middle East has long been a locus for advanced technologies of mapping. In the field of aerial vision, these technologies historically employed cartographic and photographic methods. The legacy of cadastral, photographic and photogrammetric devices continues to impact how people and regions are […]
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Unity or else: The EU after the elections
The recent European parliamentary elections took place against the backdrop of widespread expectations by experts and the general public alike of a rightwing surge. The results both confirmed and confounded these expectations. This will have crucial consequences for the EU in the months and years ahead. A pessimistic reading of the European political predicament would […]
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