The preservation of declining xiqu heritage through remediation and transmediation has often been ineffective in attracting a wider audience. The Cantonese opera film White Snake (2021), with its unusual utilization of computer-generated technology and transgressive combination of various media, offers a fresh approach to popularizing xiqu among younger audiences. To overcome aesthetic differences between cinema and xiqu, the film transforms medium specificities and transmedial potentials of Song landscape paintings and martial-arts film, adapting them to a new scenic and choreographic setting. By altering the original play’s sensory and semiotic modalities, White Snake’s transmedia aspects blaze a new trail for popularizing xiqu heritage for a new generation.

This article examines the violation of longstanding scientific norms, in particular universalism, objectivity, and truth orientation by new identity policies such as the principle of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI). The imposition of this principle by public opinion, administration, and mass media, particularly in the United States but also in other countries, contradicts the principle of equal opportunity regardless of race, gender, nationality, and class, by putting the emphasis of assessment on group identities. The implementation of this principle has begun to damage careers, threaten scientists and lower standards in academia. In order to provide a historical perspective, I review how the violation of scientific norms has impacted scientific success in past authoritarian countries, in particular the USSR under Stalin, and Nazi Germany. The comparison with past authoritarian countries does not aim at equating situations from then and now, but can help understand social and political mechanisms of current events. It also highlights in a drastic way consequences that a violation of scientific norms may have for science today.

There are other forms of iconoclasm besides the destruction of idols. For example, an iconoclast can be considered one who, instead of eliminating a deified image, reveals the trick of a magician. The manipulator distracts attention with the gesture of one hand while the other acts. This action affects everyone when it is driven by political-economic power. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas aims to eliminate magic and reveal the hidden plot that seeks to dominate society. His first panel already announces this: at the top, a map of the zodiac constellations; in the middle, Europe; and below, a genealogical tree of the Medici-Tornabuoni banking family. The Renaissance elites accumulate wealth and influence because it is seemingly dictated by the stars from birth. It is an illusion they display on the roofs of their palaces in the same way that a war is justified by a prophecy. There are some coincidences between Giordano Bruno, Aby Warburg and Vilém Flusser, in their respective ways to explain the dual role of image: both as a weapon of propaganda and as a device to disclose the truth. This article aims to reveal two different types of montages: the persuasive one, controlled by people in power through the ages, which is dismantled by the other, the photographic Warburg Atlas. A mirror broken into fragments, therefore, breaks the mirage: a new iconoclastic way.

The quantitative understanding of processes operating in the earth system has advanced significantly over the last few decades. This has led to the realization that a close interaction between deep earth and surface processes is a key element in earth dynamics and its impact on geo-environment, geo-energy, geo-resources and geo-hazards in general. The European continent and its ocean-continent margins provide an excellent natural laboratory to examine the impact of geodynamics and climate on topography at the earth’s surface. The overview presented here demonstrates the need for a further understanding of the earth system across space and timescales. Cross-border scientific cooperation on a full pan-European scale, benefiting from funding opportunities offered by the European Commission and a pro-active role in bottom-up self-organization involving members of the Earth and Cosmic Sciences section of Academia Europaea, is needed more than ever.

This article is devoted to the problem of legal socialization in the context of changes in the global social reality, and the analysis of a set of measures of citizenship legal education as a priority factor of proper legal socialization in modern conditions. The authors’ methodological basis of the research consists of a set of key approaches (synergetic, interdisciplinary, humanistic, cosmopolitan-sociological) and a three-level system of methods: philosophical, general scientific and special scientific methods. The legal statistical method is used for a comprehensive analysis and establishment of certain patterns based on statistical processing of quantitative material collected as a result of the study (certain data from UN and EUROSTAT official documents and publications were used). It is proved that legal socialization conceptualizes two processes for achieving compliance both on the basis of consensus and coercion. Therefore, the task of proper legal policy is the formation of such a mechanism of law-making, law-enforcement and law-interpreting guarantees that take into account the latest requirements of social reality and the classic moral and ethical patterns of existence of civilized nations. It is generalized that the manifestations of the transformation of legal globalization affecting the legal socialization of the individual are manifested in the following: systematic, continuous, rapid renewal of legal knowledge; obtaining legal information through the latest and classic channels; complexity of legal knowledge and practical skills of implementation, interpretation of legal norms; integrativeness; and multiculturalism of legal communication. It is pointed out that citizenship legal education is a priority means of proper legal socialization and a set of legal guarantees to ensure the proper level of proposed citizenship education.

Animation and live-action are two closely related media, which are foremost distinguished by the ideas and conventions surrounding them. The diverging discourses around animation and live action have tended to focus on animation as something constructed to represent characters and settings and on live action as something capturing actors and sets representing characters and settings. This difference between constructing and capturing, along with the perceived indexicality of the photo, is what seems to suggest live action as the preferred medium for documenting real events. Sound effects, in the form of recorded and edited sounds of objects, actions and environments, are of particular interest here, as they can be considered to balance somewhere between these poles of construction and capture, between the non-indexical and indexical, and ultimately between representation and reproduction. In this article, I will focus on aspects of ‘truth’ (understood as corresponding to some external reality) and ‘realism’ (understood as a representation of external reality) and how something comes to be perceived as truthful or realistic in animated documentaries in relation to the role played by sound effects. By discussing the Danish film Flugt [Flee], I will show how sound effects can aid in creating representations of truth.

The Mediterranean Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development (MSESD) Report reveals that the Mediterranean is an exceptional eco-region not only due to its geographical characteristics, but also its heterogeneous economic structure, in which education is regarded as a key driver of sustainable development. Given this importance, this study attempts to investigate the impact of education as a channel for human capital accumulation on two different growth concepts in a panel group of eight Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) countries. We utilize an endogenous growth model using annual observations spanning from 2000 to 2017 by employing the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator. Empirical results obtained from the Augmented Mean Group estimator indicate a positive impact of education, regardless of the growth proxy. In addition, empirical findings reveal that the impact of education on inclusive growth is five times higher than that on output growth. We also find that capital is the main driver of growth while inclusive growth is primarily triggered by education. One of the main policy implications raised in this study is that education reforms that attempt to improve educational quality will assist policymakers to achieve sustainable development goals. Extensive policy discussions related to the experiential findings are also provided.

In this article, I will try to offer both a French perspective on academic activism and a perspective based on my field of competence, that is, the social sciences and humanities. The social sciences and humanities differ from the natural sciences in many respects, but they also share some common properties, among which the most important is their common institutional belonging to the academic field. Nowadays the impact of wokism has added a common concern for the autonomy and quality of our working conditions.

The ancient links between poetry and the Olympic idea were rediscovered and revived in the Renaissance period and beyond. The first references to the ancient Olympic Games appeared in fifteenth-century Italian literature. Then they were exploited by German, French, Polish, Scottish and English poets in the following century. An analysis of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century poetic works demonstrates that Olympic themes were used in poetry for comparative purposes to evoke moral, ethical, organizational, and athletic models, and even to raise the prestige of local events. The dissemination of Olympic traditions through poetry also contributed to the development of some well-known carriers of the Olympic tradition called pseudo-Olympics, famously exemplified by the Cotswold Olimpick Games organized in England by Robert Dover and widely appraised by English poets. All these activities testify to the significant role of poetry as a principal component of Olympic legacy in European culture.

Throughout history, animals have been involved in human life in various ways. People have attributed a special role to birds of prey or exotic birds, including ostriches, whose involvement in entertainment and sports began in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article discusses the origins, development and reception of the ostrich entertainment industry in two areas of nineteenth-century Europe that had significantly different social, political and economic circumstances: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was then known) and partitioned Poland (the example of the Grand Duchy of Posen). The first uses of ostriches for entertainment purposes in Europe consisted of bird exhibitions in travelling menageries, hippodromes and in circus shows. Among the pioneers of this kind of entertainment in the British Isles was William Batty, and in the culturally excluded territories of partitioned Poland it was Ernst Renz, whose Olympic circus, thanks to its diverse programme of shows and performances, provided important entertainment and educational opportunities for Poles under occupation.

Samuel Beckett’s corpus centres on the characterization, examination and imaginative exploration of the human mind, encompassing the realms of consciousness, cognition and perception. In his teleplays, this focus is distinctively achieved through the performances of different media, which this article refers to as ‘intermedial performativity’. This term not only designates the semiotic contents of performance in intermedial forms, but also highlights the cooperative performances of the material media themselves, along with their uncharted possibilities and effects. This article delves into the ways in which intermedial performativity in Beckett’s teleplays realizes several unique configurations of the human mind, such as its split state and its transfiguration to a posthuman condition. This exploration not only sheds light on Beckett’s artistic vision and cosmic ontology, but also brings attention to the reverberations and implications of intermediality for humanity and its potential transformations.

Following the analysis of the slow uptake of open science in Italy, we identify four main lessons learned that may be useful to scholars and research policy makers engaged in promoting the uptake of open science culture and practices in their own countries.

The COVID pandemic enforced unprecedented pressure upon the academic clinician workforce globally. While in some aspects this has been a time of opportunity for academic clinicians, it has also exposed the vulnerabilities of this career path and the challenges early-career academic clinicians face. These challenges include the lack of dedicated training programmes, obstacles to international recognition of their career paths, and the remuneration gap between academic clinicians and their clinical counterparts. Addressing these issues will require a concerted effort from policymakers, funding agencies, and the medical community. However, investing in increasing the pool of academic clinicians in the long term is essential to advancing medical knowledge and improving the wellbeing of all of society.

In this article, I describe Germany’s Cancel Culture and Limitations of Debate by referring to my own biography and current social-political events.

To stay within a ‘well below 2°C’ climate change track, the Paris Agreement and goal 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for climate action – a global decrease in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Arguments in this study are derived from the hypothesis that a collective identity among the EU states would foster collective actions toward reducing global warming. Thus, the objective of this study is to explore how different EU countries (Poland, Italy, and Germany) employ three decarbonization pillars: waste recycling, eco-innovation, and policy innovation (WEP) as a yardstick to mitigate global warming and attain the EU’s ‘net-zero’ emissions by 2050. The study also utilizes annual data collected from the Eurostat indicator from 2014 to 2020. The findings reveal that Germany has the most successful average recycling rate in Europe; 65.5% of the country’s domestic waste is either recycled or reused. On the other hand, Poland is a low performer in eco-innovation. Additionally, an analysis of policy regulations reveals that both Germany and Italy can comply with the policy and regulations of the EU on carbon neutrality. At the same time, Poland, on the other hand, lacks the commitment to carbon neutrality due to its reliance on carbon-intensive coal. Therefore, this study recommends translating EU climatic laws in their simplest forms into local laws. More so, citizens’ behaviour will be further influenced toward environmental sustainability by this collective mindset.

For half a century, digital machines have lent their computational power to mediate text-based, diegetic worlds, in the shape of software that we call games, video games, or sometimes interactive fiction. Perhaps the first such was Gregory Yob’s simple labyrinth-monster game Hunt the Wumpus (1973), but ever since then the games (if that is what they should be called) have become larger and far more complex, and, in recent decades, a single such work can contain more text than, say, Shakespeare’s collected plays. Given this massive textual content, as well as the often experimental and innovative nature of these works, they can also be considered a new form of novel; a kind of text that has much more in common with literature than with other digital games such as Candy Crush Saga, Age of Empires or Counterstrike. In these ‘games’, we find complex characters, difficult ethical choices (left to the player), imaginative landscapes and mythologies, and thousands if not millions of lines of carefully crafted prose. Teams of writers work collectively to stich these textual universes together, under production conditions that might remind us of multi-season TV series, but which are structured and consumed very differently – in fact, more like literature than TV. The claim made in this article is that the perspective of the novel (or supernovel) is a productive one for understanding the nature of these artistic works of ludic software. Should they be considered Literature? Through a discussion of the notions of literature, novel, and fiction and through a close ludic reading of Fallout: New Vegas (2010) I will argue that these textual games are in fact Literature, a new kind of novelistic genre, and discuss the wider cultural implications of this assessment.

Economic integration has become a general trend in the development of cooperation between states. At the initial stages of integration construction, integration associations are a special kind of international organization. Later, the legal complexes of integration formations stand out and represent separate, independent legal systems (both from international law and from the national (domestic) law of the member states). This article attempts to theoretically generalize, synthesize and develop scientific provisions on integration associations and the legal systems created in them, accumulated in domestic and foreign legal science. The purpose of this study was the formation of a balanced, reasoned position, which fitted modern realities, on the existence of integration law. The methodological basis of the research was formed by a complex of general scientific and special methods for studying legal concepts, institutions and processes in the field of integration law: comparative legal, systemic and structural. Thanks to their application, it becomes possible to identify the general, specific and singular in the activities of integration associations. We managed to substantiate the concept of the formation within the framework of integration associations of our own institutional and legal systems (integration law), which have a close genetic link with international and national law. In our opinion, integration law (or ‘the law of integration formations’) acts as a system that presupposes a single internal structure, hierarchy and mutual consistency of its constituent parts.

Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), incorporates the media of film and photography and utilizes various filmmaking techniques, including cinematography, sound effects, and dialogues, to reflect on the complex relationship between humans, technology and power. Through cinematographic techniques such as light and dark contrast, shifting eye-level and high camera angles, as well as geometric patterns, the film portrays a technologically-advanced futuristic city and its underlying issues of power struggles and social hierarchy. The portrayal of replicants, through static and moving images and sound effects, emphasizes their close resemblance to humans, particularly their performance of emotions, and how technology alters the fundamental concept of humanity. Photography, as a medium, captures an unreliable and incomplete moment of childhood to expose the dystopian nightmare of memory manipulation that severs the connection between memory and identity. This article analyses Blade Runner as an intermedial narrative that highlights the tension between the deceptive appearance of a futuristic city, with flying cars, replicants, and other technologies created for human convenience, and the harsh reality of posthuman crises such as social hierarchy, technological dominance, memory manipulation, and replicant rebellion.

Philosophers have described several approaches for scientific research, including causal inference and induction, the hypothetico-deductive method, inference of the best explanation, Bayesianism or causal network analysis. Prescriptive truth is dependent upon the values that one brings into scientific inquiry. One may oppose the writings of Bertrand Russell and Helen Longino. The former argues that values may negatively impact inquiry, while Longino argues that value-free research does not exist, and we must cope with it. However, Longino proposes a very stringent value-system which does not allow certain research to be conducted. The problem arises when prescriptive truth becomes hypertrophic, self-righteous, rigid, and unconnected to reality, which is the transformation into ideology. Ideological intrusion into science and medicine, such as with Social Justice Ideology (SJI), is indeed a problem in Western democracies. It derived from scholarship originating in the humanities (law, social sciences, branches of philosophy, etc.) and then transferred to Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM). The STEMM field was thought to be immune to SJI because of its rigorous methodology, but the hyper-specialization and absence of training in the humanities made it vulnerable to SJI. These intrusions into STEMM and the amplification in the last 2–3 years are potentially due to ‘concept creep,’ psychogenic contamination, herd behaviour and, for activists, strategical equivocation (motte-and-bailey fallacy).