The involvement of Western citizens in jihadist activities bears important epistemological consequences: presented as a clash of civilizations, Islamic terrorism brings to the fore the issue of civil war. This article, after underlining that both terrorism and holy wars have a long pedigree in Western history, traces the interplay of religious and political tropes and semantics in the origin of terrorism, in the West in general and in Spain in particular. Highlighting the overlap of traditional faithful/unfaithful cleavages into modern friend/enemy political dichotomies, it summarizes the history of modern Spain as a sequence of civil wars in which political and meta-political discourses and practices of exclusion evolved towards extermination solutions in the twentieth century. This account allows for a reflection on the crisis of the regime of memory established after Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.

To investigate the identity attributes of Turkish people living in France it is necessary to consider ‘Turkish identity’, determine the stage of their identity building, and understand the role religion plays in this quest for identity. Considering the complex structure of Ottoman society and the multiple and dynamic properties of loyalty criteria, it is difficult to ascertain the definition of ‘Turkishness’ even in Turkey. It is probably not necessary to explain that this is even more difficult for Turks who are in the minority.

This case study concerns the analysis of a symbolic national grievance: the interpretation of a one-sided, unempathetic deheroization of a champion of national liberty, its historiographical and memory political contexts, and its outcome, strengthening the dichotomous conflicting systems of memory.

This article pursues a comparative approach to honour, a choice determined not only by the fact that anthropology, with regard to other disciplines, has striven to build its specificity on comparative analysis ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. A further reason is to steer clear of methodological nationalism,1 i.e. to sidestep forms of Orientalism.2 The point, therefore, is to avoid the pitfall by which issues of honour and its more violent forms, such as honour killings or blood feuds, are downscaled to a ‘Turkish’ or ‘Albanian problem’ or to a phenomenon specific solely to Middle Eastern societies.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, London became an international centre of commerce. The trade in exotic luxury goods played a significant part in this process. In contemporary society, the taste for luxury and the economic, social and cultural changes it embodied were viewed with both fascination and distrust. The new shopping centres where luxury goods were on display were thus accused of corrupting public morality and damaging national trade. The public debate about luxury was in part conducted on the stage of the commercial Elizabethan theatre, especially in the new genre of so-called city comedies that portrayed, parodied and criticized social life in the expanding city. Ben Jonson was a master of this genre and his most famous comedy, Volpone or the Fox (1606), dealt with the contested issue of luxury. In contrast to many previous readings that have interpreted the play in terms derived from later liberal and Marxist economic thinking, this article analyses the theme of luxury in relation to contemporary economic and moral debates. I will argue that the play depicts the main character Volpone’s taste for luxury and the way he acquires it as both morally and economically damaging for an economy such as the English one, which at the time was built on personal debt and credit and therefore heavily reliant on credibility and reciprocal social obligations. However, this lesson is complicated by the fact that Volpone itself was in fact part of the economic relations Jonson criticized, since it was a commodity – and, in the eyes of many contemporaries, indeed a luxury commodity – on London’s thriving theatre market. I argue that Jonson is aware of this contradiction without being able to resolve it. Ultimately, then, Volpone is an ambivalent comedy intended to provoke reflection in the audience about their consumption of spectacular luxury both inside and outside the theatre.

The crisis of the humanities in higher education has been around for some time. Over the years, concerns regarding this crisis have spread extensively. To the optimist, such a crisis presents new opportunities and challenges; to the pessimist, old practices die hard. In fact, the crisis of the humanities in Chinese academic circles has yet to attract proper attention and discussion. If we think of the past 30 years, it is clear that higher education in China faces this crisis, with the various instances of poisonings and murders amongst Chinese students being a further indicator of its seriousness. Thus, despite differences in its manifestation throughout various countries, it seems that the crisis of the humanities is a worldwide phenomenon. Below, I will discuss three sets of problems in order to explore some possible solutions to this crisis.

The discourse on ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ often implicitly or explicitly suggests that the natural sciences are at the forefront of the development towards worldwide mobility, communication and cooperation in the world of knowledge, while the humanities and social sciences look more frequently at the specifics of certain cultures and countries or lag behind in their intention to internationalize. On dits can be persistent in the domain, among other things, because systematic information on mobility and migration of scholars, as well as on their international activities is scarce. This contribution tries to extract what can be found on mobility and migration of scholars in Europe. The available information suggests that differences by disciplinary groups are unexpectedly small.

This paper focuses on the processes through which scientific fields are organized over time. It is argued that new approaches in scientific work are hampered by authority structures within national systems for research and established approaches within disciplines, but that these obstacles can be overcome by means of external funding, particularly through new funding sources, as well as the international developments of an innovation. As far as the latter are concerned, they are expected to first lead to informal collaboration among scholars. In the passage of time this informal collaboration becomes more and more formalized. In order to analyse such processes the paper presents a model with three phases labelled as creating, gathering and communicating. This model is then used in an empirical study of corpus linguistics, i.e. the systematic analysis of well-defined populations of written and/or spoken language material. It is shown in the paper how corpus linguistics was developed by scientific innovators who were initially questioned. With the passage of time they created a number of international organizations, which have eventually become more and more formalized, many of them publishing their own journals. In this way the paper demonstrates the significance of organizing for the development of scientific fields.

Political theater is a trend that, during the avant-garde 1920s, emerged at the intersection of efforts to liberate artistic forms and oppressed groups in society. It was an influence on Slovenian theatrical artists at the Workers’ Stage (Delavski oder) already in the interwar period. A trend towards ‘political theater’, one of the tendencies of politicized performing arts in the period, flourished in Slovenia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Against the background of an identity crisis of the Yugoslav state and its ideology, political theater addressed great stories of History and the Revolution in a post-avant-garde manner. During the transition, political theater initially lost its edge but was reborn in the 21st century. As a post-dramatic practice associated with performance, it now parses its own politics. It is a forum for critiquing small, local stories that nonetheless evince the contradictions of a peripheral nation-state in the era of transnational late capitalism.

Every society produces its own concept of otherness. It is a universal fact, necessary for the social cohesion of the majority group. In recent decades, along with the development of a European consciousness and citizenship, the concept of ‘other’ relating to immigration is largely imposed on Muslims in Western Europe. There are historical reasons for this social enmity that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and to nineteenth century colonialism. However, other contemporary reasons have reinforced these mind-sets; some of which are international events (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution, the wars in Iraq and Syria, international terror of Islamic inspiration, and so on). These facts have – at least since 11 September 2001 – made the expression of Islamophobic opinions politically and morally more acceptable in Europe.

A major challenge for education and educational research is to build on our present understanding of learning to design environments for education that are conducive to fostering students’ self-regulatory and cooperative learning skills, transferable knowledge, and a disposition toward competent thinking and problem solving. Using the CLIA-model (Competence, Learning, Intervention, Assessment) as a framework for developing learning environments, and taking the growing knowledge base on self-regulated learning as a background, this article discusses an intervention study that aimed at the design and evaluation of a powerful learning environment for fostering self-regulated learning in university freshmen, thereby improving their learning proficiency. More specifically, the intervention in this environment focused on the trainability of four cognitive (orienting, planning, self-testing, and reflecting), and four complementary affective self-regulation skills (respectively self-judging, valuing, coping, and attributing). The effects of the learning environment were investigated using a pre-test – post-test design with a control group. The participants were 141 first-year students of business economics. The positive effects of the intervention on students’ self-regulated learning and on their academic performance is illustrated for two of the eight self-regulation skills, namely orienting (preparing one’s learning process by examining the characteristics of a learning task) and self-judging (evaluating one’s competences in view of an accurate appraisal of the efforts needed to approach and accomplish a learning task).

One can find many proposals for policy responses to global environmental problems. Different disciplines – notably economics, geography, innovation studies, policy and political sciences, psychology and sociology – offer partly inconsistent advice. This undermines the social-political acceptance of policies as voters and politicians are likely to be left confused. To decide about an adequate sustainability policy mix we need to concur on the core problems such a mix has to tackle. I address four of these hereafter. Each one involves important issues of disagreement as well as unresolved questions.

A Turkish girl in Germany emancipated herself from her family in a long, bitter, almost deadly struggle. She fought for her education and gained it. Indignation at the disregard of personal freedom in her migrant community turned her into a writer and her success was amazing. However, it earned her the suspicion of all those who prefer the integrity of the group to the dignity of the individual. Told in this reduced manner, the story of Necla Kelek resembles one of Scheherazade’s tales. I will therefore try to tell it again in a more specific way.

This study examines the short-run response of daily stock prices in the Spanish market to the announcements of inflation news at a sector level at the moments when the Spanish authorities announced the IPC (consumer price index) during the period 1995–2004. The study also incorporates two novel explanatory variables: core inflation and ‘non-core’ inflation rate components on the one hand, and the spread between the Spanish and European inflation rates (harmonized) on the other hand. It is concluded that the ‘non-core’ component of the inflation rate, which is more volatile, has negative effects on some sector returns; additionally, in drawing too far apart from the European inflation rate, the Spanish inflation rate negatively affects sector returns, such as in the ‘Consumer Goods’ sector, which is subject to strong foreign competition. In the long-term analysis, the lagged core inflation (structural component) negatively affects sector returns.

I use the term ‘expelled’ to describe a diversity of conditions. They include the growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of the displaced in poor countries who are warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, of the minoritized and persecuted in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, of workers whose bodies are destroyed on the job and rendered useless at far too young an age, of able-bodied surplus populations warehoused in ghettoes and slums. But I also include the fact that pieces of the biosphere are being expelled from their life space – and I insist that the tame language of climate change does not quite capture the fact, at ground level, of vast expanses of dead land and dead water. My argument is that this massive and very diverse set of expulsions is actually signaling a deeper systemic transformation, one documented in bits and pieces in multiple specialized studies but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism – and global destruction. As an analytic category, expulsion is to be distinguished from the more common ‘social exclusion’: the latter happens inside a system and in that sense can be reduced, ameliorated, and even eliminated. As I conceive of them,1 expulsions happen at the systemic edge. At this time, I see the proliferation of such systemic edges deep inside national territories as more significant than the borders of the interstate system – which are open for some and closed for others. In brief, the types of complex systems that are the focus of the larger research project of which the present article forms a part contain multiple systemic edges: they partly reflect the multiplying of negative conditions in the diverse domains contained in such systems, from prisons and refugee camps to financial exploitations and environmental destructions. None of this is new, but the sharp escalation towards negative outcomes since the 1980s in much of the world does invite a question as to the sustainability of it all.

While Past Narratives have events as their basic units, Future Narratives characteristically operate with nodes. A node is a situation that allows for more than just one continuation. Therefore, by definition, Past Narratives are uni-linear, while Future Narratives are multi-linear. Thus, by operating with nodes, Future Narratives cannot only talk about the future, but they perform aspects of futurity that seem essential: its openness, its contingency, and the fact that behind each present moment there opens up a space of possibilities that has not yet coagulated into actuality. Since Future Narratives can be found in all genres and media and, what is more, bridge the fiction/non-fiction divide, the impact of Future Narratives and their conceptualization is across the board and of greatest importance not only to media studies and teaching, but also to any kind of communicating about the future.

The literatures that have emerged from post-war Turkish migration to Europe have become a topic of discussion since the 1980s. However, studies comparing the emergence of these literatures in different European contexts are rare. This article compares Sweden and West Germany, two contexts where migration from Turkey has a similar history, but where the resulting literatures differ massively due to different political and literary conditions. Multicultural, and in particular multilingual, public policies in Sweden have facilitated the emergence of a Kurdish diaspora literature; this then became a major impetus for the emergence of a Kurdish literature in Turkey when it was finally possible to write and publish in Kurdish there in the 1990s. The emergence of the New Left in West Germany, reflected in a re-awakened workers’ literature and new left-wing publishing houses in the German literary field, has provided publishing opportunities for Turkish migrant writers influenced by a socialist internationalist tradition in the 1970s. These works laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has since come to be regarded as having changed the understanding of what it means to be German.